One of the first posts I wrote, which described a typical Web Testing process, mentioned that a bug [...]]]>

An area that has not been looked at in much detail yet on this blog is what software or tools you can use to record and track bugs, issues or defects that you find when testing a website.

One of the first posts I wrote, which described a typical Web Testing process, mentioned that a bug tracking system ‘can be hugely beneficial, as you can set priorities for each bug and then understand how many bugs you have at each priority level. It gives you a much better understanding of how many bugs you have to fix before you can launch and calculate how long you expect that process to take.’

There are a good range of bug tracking applications out there, a lot of them web-based, which are vital when tracking bugs and associated information about each issue. Here we take a look at 4 of the main players in bug tracking software, which are also available in our Testing Tools Directory.

Why Use Bug Tracking Software?

Once you start testing a website you can come up with all sorts of bugs and issues that need addressing. I’m talking a bit more than the odd typo or broken image. Perhaps you find problems with the site search returning strange results or the checkout process not working correctly or there are specific issues in different browsers that work fine in other browsers. There are several different reasons to use an application that tracks bugs and feature requests.

Complicated Bugs

As bugs start to get a little more complex it is important to hand the developer all of the required details about each bug so that he or she can fix it in a reasonable amount of time, without chasing around trying to reproduce it or get a screenshot or URL showing where that bug was found. Bug tracking software gives you a structured format to report bugs so that you include the URL where you found the bug, provide a full description and a screenshot and what browser or operating system you were using. These details will shorten the amount of time that a developer needs in order to squash the bug and improve their productivity. Get more bugs squashed in less time.

Lots of Bugs

Alongside the complicated bugs will still be the relatively quick and simple items to fix such as the odd layout problem, typo, broken image or link, etc. These bugs, whilst they do need to be fixed, are sometimes not as important as other bugs and, when presented in a list or on a spreadsheet, can often be completed ahead of more important items because the developer naturally follows the list through from start to finish. Bug tracking software allows you to prioritise bugs so that developers work on the most critical issues first and leave the less important bugs until later. Rearranging priorities in a list or on a spreadsheet gets too cumbersome when dealing with a large number of bugs but issue tracking software handles this aspect with ease.

Improved Workflow

With bug tracking software you can assign bugs to different developers so everyone knows what they are working on. Once those bugs are completed then the developer assigns them back to you for checking or verifying. If you are happy you can close the bug, if not then reopen it and give it back to the developer. Do this for each bug and you can understand exactly where each bug is in the process, how many are assigned, how many are to be verified, etc. It allows you to have a much better handle on exactly where your web project is at instead of continually poring over your list or spreadsheet and trying to make an educated guess.

This improved workflow eases pressure on you and your developers and improves productivity because developers can just get on with fixing bugs or working on feature requests. It also means that you are not constantly updating lists and spreadsheets with the latest status of all the bugs reported.

Bug Archives

Once bugs are fixed, tested and closed they can be referred to at any time so that you can see when the bug was reported, when it was fixed, who fixed it and what the developer did to fix it (assuming they fill their comments in correctly). This provides an extremely useful archive if you ever need to refer to a particular bug again instead of trying to go back through emails or out of date spreadsheets to find details on that bug or feature request.

Some bug tracking systems allow time tracking so you can see how much time was spent on fixing a bug. Using bug tracking software ensures that developers become more accountable because their comments and times are recorded and can easily be referred to.

Bug Tracking Software

Now that we’ve established what bug tracking software offers and why web project managers and testers should incorporate it as part of most web projects (definitely on all large web projects and probably on most small to medium projects too) let’s have a look at some of the main bug tracking applications currently being used.

My specific experience is with using Bugzilla so let’s start with that one.

Bugzilla

Bugzilla - classic open source bug tracking application

Bugzilla was originally released by Netscape in 1998 and so has been around for a long while now. This open source software is one of the first bug tracking applications that spring to mind and, although it takes some setting up and the interface is a bit tricky to use, it has everything you need to record and track bugs effectively.

It is possible to sidestep the web interface by using a desktop client that synchronizes with the central bugzilla software. My specific experience with bugzilla was using the Deskzilla client on a Mac, which worked well.

As Bugzilla is open source then it is free to use although it needs to be installed and set up on a server in order to be ready to use.

Unfuddle

Unfuddle - web-based bug tracking software

Unfuddle is a hosted bug tracking application that also includes Git hosting and Subversion hosting allowing you to create your own secure code repositories. There are also some project management tools included such as tracking your project against specific milestones and time tracking is available in the more expensive corporate and enterprise packages.

Bugs, issues and feature requests are raised as tickets in the Unfuddle system and each ticket includes workflow management and an audit trail so you can keep track of who made changes to a ticket and when these changes were made.

If you need the code repositories and project tracking functionality along with a straightforward bug tracking system then Unfuddle could be the answer. There is a free package available that includes 1 project for 2 users. After that prices start at $9 per month.

Trac

Trac - open source issue tracking software with project management tools and a wiki

Trac is also open source software that combines an issue tracking system with a wiki and project management features such as milestones and being able to document the roadmap for a web project or software development. Trac can also serve as a web interface for version control systems giving you a usable front-end for Subversion or Git.

Tracking progress of individual bugs, issues or feature requests is straightforward with each one having its own numbered ticket with the ability to filter tickets by severity, project component, version or owner. Keeping on top of progress is also easy with the ability to set milestones and being able to see how far you are from reaching each milestone.

Trac has a good set of features and is a lightweight and flexible system that should be very useful for most web development projects. It runs on most operating systems but does require some setting up and this is perhaps its biggest downside that I can see if you want to start tracking bugs straightaway.

FogBugz

FogBugz - web-based or installed bug tracking software with large feature set

FogBugz is available as a hosted application, called FogBugz on demand, or as installed software on either Windows, Mac or Unix operating systems.

There are several parts to FogBugz, the issue tracking section makes it very easy to report bugs and you can even create bugs via email or create bugs quickly without having to fill in everything so you can get the bug into the system. Whilst I think this is a good feature you do need to make sure you go back and complete all the details before you assign the bug to a developer to work on. Everything is saved in a complete case history for future reference.

But issue tracking is not all that Fogbugz does, there is a project planning section where you can outline tasks, break larger tasks into subtasks, enter estimates and set milestones. Fogbugz also has something called Evidence-Based Scheduling, which looks at what tasks are being estimated and how long they actually took to complete and then plot a probability curve to work out whether a milestone can be hit or not. The FogBugz Wiki allows you to keep all project documentation in one place and there are also a whole load of plugins available to extend the functionality plus FogBugz can integrate with another piece of software from the same company (Fog Creek Software) called Kiln, which is a version control system.

FogBugz is the most expensive of the bug tracking software applications featured here with prices starting at $25 per user per month for FogBugz on demand or $999 for 5 users for the installed version of the software.

Conclusion

Whichever of the above applications you use, as long as you use one of them and get your workflow organised in terms of how you report, record and assign bugs then you will find that it becomes a breeze to keep track of exactly where you are at in your website testing. You won’t miss any issues (as long as they are reported and entered into the bug tracker), you can prioritise showstoppers or critical bugs easily to fix those first and archive completed bugs for future reference.

If I had to pick one of the applications above then I would go for either Unfuddle or FogBugz (on demand) because I like web-based applications as there is nothing really to set up or install. Both of these have a trial although both cost money whereas Bugzilla and Trac are free but require time installing and setting them up on a server.

FogBugz has the better overall feature set and I am intrigued as to how the Evidence-Based Scheduling works, as I have not come across that before. But it terms of a cheap, easy to use, bug tracking system that is ready to go and will do the job, I would pick Unfuddle with the caveat of going for FogBugz if I had a bigger team (and didn’t mind paying more money).

At the moment that testing subject of choice [...]]]>

When I’m reading blog posts, news articles or Twitter discussions concerning the testing of websites, the article or discussion in question actually relate to a single aspect of testing and gives the impression that there is only one form of website testing that we should be concerned with.

At the moment that testing subject of choice is known as Conversion Rate Testing, or sometimes called CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). This would normally mean that the tests being carried out are Split Tests or Multivariate Tests, using software such as Google Weboptimizer.

Don’t get me wrong, conversion rate testing is really important and can greatly increase the number of conversions on a particular page, which can raise sales, enquiries, profits or whatever aspect of conversion you are trying to improve.

But there are other forms of testing websites, quite a few in fact, and some that are quite basic that get overlooked. I wanted to give a brief description for each type of testing to help you understand all the areas that can (and should) be tested when launching a new website, rolling out a set of updates or at least checking on a regular basis.

Different Forms of Testing

Functional testing

This form of testing aims to ensure that the website works correctly or as it was intended to. You click on a link, does the website display the correct page? You complete a search, does the website return the correct search results? You add a product to the basket, does the website add the correct product to the basket? Functional testing is going through the entire website, including content management system or admin area, to make sure that each function within the website is performing as it should be.

Browser compatibility testing

Different web browsers display web pages differently from each other. This is one of the least helpful aspects of the Internet and browser compatibility testing or browser checking involves testing the website on each of the major browsers (or each browser that you have decided to support), which generally includes IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 3, Chrome, Safari 3 and Safari 4 on both PCs and Macs. You could possibly include Opera 9 and Opera 10 in that list in addition to testing your website on Linux as well as Windows and OSX. You could also check your analytics to see which browsers are most commonly visiting your site. There are several decent browser checking tools listed in our testing tools directory.

Usability testing

Usability testing assumes that your website works correctly and displays in each major browser correctly. However, a website that functions correctly is not necessarily a usable website for your target audience. Usability testing enables you to show your website to a group of users, ask them to perform certain actions and see how they accomplish those tasks. There are many reasonably priced usability testing tools on the market that have made this type of testing much more straightforward, many of which are listed in our testing tools directory. It is possible to gain great insight into how people actually use your website and a lot of the experts agree that you can pick up most usability issues when testing with only 5 users.

Accessibility testing

Accessibility testing is extremely important to make sure that your website complies with best practice and accessibility guidelines plus legislation surrounding accessible websites, which is in force in both the US and UK. In the US there is Section 508, which is part of the Rehabilitation Act and in the UK we have the Disability Discrimination Act or DDA. A fully accessible website not only benefits those users that would otherwise have difficulty using your website but search engines will also be able to navigate and understand your content more easily, thereby helping your search engine rankings. To help you test your website’s accessibility there are some accessibility testing tools available in our directory although manual testing is still recommended.

Performance testing

Performance testing is an area that has always been important but possibly even more so now that Google is starting to incorporate the performance of a website into its ranking algorithms. There used to be an 8 second rule, which believed that a user will wait no longer than 8 seconds for a page to download before they click back and try another website. That rule is a long way out of date, it is now no more than 1 or 2 seconds. Performance testing can show you when your website is slowing down, which pages are taking time to load and what element of the page is causing the problem. Performance testing tools are covered in our testing tools directory.

Stress or load testing

There is a difference between stress and load testing in that stress testing concerns itself with trying to break the system you are testing whilst load testing aims to find out how much volume you can put through the system. Both of these forms of testing are generally for larger websites and web applications. A range of stress and load testing tools can be found in our testing tools directory.

Site monitoring

A really simple test that you can put in place is to automatically monitor your website to check for downtime or outages. Nobody likes a website to be down including users and search engines. Regular downtime will lower confidence in your website and they could be affecting your traffic levels and therefore sales or enquiries without you knowing. A selection of site monitoring tools can be found in our testing tools directory.

Conversion rate testing

The current favourite form of testing, and an important one too. Conversion rate testing or optimisation can greatly improve the amount of visitors your website converts into enquiries and/or sales. If your SEO brings in 100 visitors a day and your site currently converts 5 of those into becoming customers then, with successful conversion rate testing, you could convert more visitors into customers and make more sales. Conversion rate testing normally takes the form of running split or multivariate tests on your website, many of which are listed in our testing tools directory.

Security testing

Websites can have security holes that could be extremely damaging for your business if they were to be found and exploited. Security testing aims to find where those security holes exist so that you can do something about them.

Spelling and Grammar checking

It is always useful to fully read through all text on the website to ensure there are no typos or grammar mistakes. You will also spot how you can improve the readability of text and other areas that perhaps need some attention. Also make sure you read through all messages that appear when signing up for a newsletter, adding products to a basket, or registering including any error messages. Simple changes to the wording of an error message into a nicely worded error message can make a big difference.

So there you have it, website testing can take on many forms and all of them should be completed to a greater or lesser degree. At least by completing each type of testing you can be aware of any issues or areas for improvement so then properly plan out what action you are going to take and when. Good luck with whatever testing you complete.

I’ve taken some time to update, reorganise and expand the testing tools page so that it become more of a directory rather than just a long list. This makes it easier for me to maintain and add to plus easier (hopefully) for you [...]]]>

Now contains a total of 96 website testing tools spanning 14 different categories.

I’ve taken some time to update, reorganise and expand the testing tools page so that it become more of a directory rather than just a long list. This makes it easier for me to maintain and add to plus easier (hopefully) for you to find the testing tools that you are looking for.

The Testing Tools page now serves as the main entrance into the directory with each category having its own page. Each category will continue to have more software and tools added over time plus there will be additional category or two coming along shortly.

Because I’ve been doing a bit of research into Usability Tools, this category is the main beneficiary of the reorganisation and now contains 29 usability testing applications. This is mostly due to the great blog post at Useful Usability, which also gives you pros, cons and pricing information for the 24 usability tools they feature.

Another category that has grown significantly is Split Or Multivariate Testing Tools, which now shows 16 applications. Some of this increase is down to a great comparison resource over at Which Multivariate? This newly released site has reviews and comparison charts of all the major split and multivariate testing software tools out there.

The full list of categories contained in the updated testing tools directory are:

1. Validation and Accessibility Testing Tools
2. Browser Checking Tools
3. Screen Resolutions Tools
4. Link Checking Tools
5. Site Performance Testing Tools
6. Stress or Load Testing Tools
7. Usability Testing Tools
8. Split or Multivariate Testing Tools
9. SEO Tools
10. Web Analytics
11. Online Surveys
12. Site Monitoring Tools
13. Software Testing Tools
14. Web Development Tools

I will continue to pick up on the huge number of testing tools being released and add to each category as time allows. If you spot a testing tool, which you feel is worth me adding to the directory, then please do contact me. At some point I will get around to adding a dedicated submission form if there are enough people willing to add testing applications.

Feel free to retweet, digg or add to delicious as you like or let me know any feedback (good or bad) in the comments.

Web-based usability testing tools are starting to become more prevalent these days with the likes of Clixpy, Loop11 and UserTesting all appearing recently.

We shall have a look at Loop11 first of all, which has been in private beta for around 4 months now but is soon to be released to [...]]]>

Loop11 - User Experience Tool

Web-based usability testing tools are starting to become more prevalent these days with the likes of Clixpy, Loop11 and UserTesting all appearing recently.

We shall have a look at Loop11 first of all, which has been in private beta for around 4 months now but is soon to be released to the general public.

According to their web site – Loop11 is a web-based user-experience testing tool, allowing companies to conduct online, unmoderated user testing on any kind of digital interface. Loop11 is not a survey or web analytics tool, but a user experience tool… helping you to understand user behaviour.

Sounds good so far, so how do you get started?

First of all, once you log in, click on the big ‘Create New User Test’ button in bright orange so you can’t miss it. You will be presented with a form with the following fields:

Public Title – this will be seen by your test participants
Working Title – used to identify your test for you only
Copy User Test From – so you can duplicate an existing test or just start with a blank one.

Loop11 - Create User Test

Once you have filled those fields in you enter into a 5 step process to complete the creation of your user test.

Step 1 – User Test Details
This includes the ability to set your language and Loop11 supports over 40 languages.

Step 2 – Tasks & Questions
You have the ability to add tasks or questions to your user test and Loop11 provides some help if you are unsure what to do in this respect. A task would be something that you would like the user to perform such as find a particular piece of information on your web site and to add one you give it a name, a scenario that tells the user what it is you want them to do, the start URL where they commence the task and the success URL, which the user has to navigate to in order to complete the task.

I created a task to ask the user to find step 6 from the article ‘How To Test Web Forms in 7 Steps’. When the user is carrying out this task they can either abandon the task if they could not accomplish it or mark it as complete.

To add a question, you choose the question type from a list including multiple choice, rating scale and open ended. So you could ask ‘How Usable In This Web Site?’ and ask the user to rate on a scale from 1 to 10 or using words such as Poor, Average, Good, Excellent.

I entered the question, ‘How easy is it to use the search facility on this web site?’ and gave the possible answers as being Poor, Fair, Good and Excellent (I copied them from Loop11’s help text) plus I made the question mandatory.

If you want the user to type in an answer such as correctly answering how much one of your services costs then choose one of the open ended questions.

Each time you had a task or a question you are presented with the Step 2 – Task & Questions screen helpfully showing all the items you have added with the ability to either edit, delete, duplicate, preview or move them up or down in the list. Once you are happy with what you have set you click ’save and continue’ to move onto step 3.

Loop11 - Tasks & Questions confirmation

Step 3 – User Test Options
This is where you set the number of participants that you would like to complete the user test, from 1 to 999 and specify the thank you text the user sees on completion of the site. There are some other useful settings here such as being able to block or allow specific IP addresses.

Step 4 – Invite Participants
So now you get to invite the lucky participants to take part in your user test. Here you have 3 options:

i) Create a link to your user test – Loop11 generates a link for you that you can distribute any way you like.
ii) Create a popup invitation that can reside on your own web site – Loop11 gives you the code for a popup window to be placed on your web site.
iii) Purchase participants – Loop11 gives you the names of 6 companies that you can potentially purchase participants from with a link to direct users to your user test. This seems to essentially be the same as choosing item 1 although you get the details of 6 companies that you can buy users from.

Step 5 – Launch
Once you have sorted out how you are going to invite your participants you end up on the final step, to launch your user test. This gives you a summary of what you have selected and allows you to preview your test before you launch it. You should be careful because once you have launched your test you are not able to go back and edit it unfortunately.

If, like me, you realise that the questions you have set make little sense to someone seeing your web site for the first time then you should go back and edit them now before you finalise your user test.

Preview – when I clicked on the Preview button when still on step 1 I got a message telling me there was an internal server error and that someone had been notified of it. Once I moved onto step 2 the Preview button did seem to work fine and showed me the first couple of pages that a user will see when participating in the web site evaluation.

One of the tasks I had prepared was for a visitor to submit an enquiry form because I wanted to test that visitors could use the enquiry form including field validation. When previewing the test, I submitted an enquiry but my enquiry form kept telling me that I had not input the validation code that I have to prevent automated software from filling it in (even though I had input the code). This is possibly due to Loop11 conflicting with the validation method of my enquiry form so I removed that task from my test. I will raise this separately with Loop11 because many tests could require this type of input and so the preview does need to be able to handle that aspect.

Launch – once you click on Launch you will be presented with a summary page showing the details of your test plus the URL that will link to the test that you can distribute. If you elected to choose that you wanted the invitation for the test to appear in a popup window then the details of the JavaScript that you need to add to your web site will be given to you.

Loop11 - Launch screen

My Projects

Once you have launched your test you can view the results from within the My Projects tab. For each project you can see the date it was launched, how many responses received, its current status and then you can view the design of the project (what tasks, questions and other settings you selected when creating the project) and its report.

View Report

Once your test starts gaining participants you can view your report, which gives you access to the following screens:

Dashboard – first of all this shows the average task completion rate for your test presented as a pie chart. As I only had one task I can see that the average completion rate was about two thirds whilst one third abandoned the task. Underneath is presented the task results overview which shows the average page views and average time taken to reach a resolution for each task. You also get a bar chart showing the task completion rate for each task.

You are able to export the results of the report at any time in either CSV, Excel XML or PDF formats, which I think is pretty useful for any presentations that you are putting together and/or any followup actions required as a result of this testing.

Loop11 - Dashboard screen

Tasks – this page shows more detail for each task including the completion rate taken from the dashboard but also further aspects such as page views to complete task, time to complete task, most common success page, most common abandon page, most common first click and most common navigation path.

There is also a function called Participant path analysis, which allows you to go through each participant and what they clicked on when completing the task.

These reports give you invaluable information for how users approach each task that you have set them, what they click on first (possibly giving you the most eye opening results), how long it takes them to complete the task and more.

Questions – this report goes through each of the questions that you posed for your users and the results or answers that they gave. For the question in my test, ‘How easy is it to use the search facility on this web site?’, two thirds of respondents felt it was good and one third said it was excellent. However, for my open ended second question, ‘How much does the monthly link check service cost?’ I got a variety of answers where I think respondents did not really understand the question I was asking.

Not only are you testing how users experience your web site, you are also testing your ability to set good tasks and questions that your users will understand.

Participants – the participants section gives you detailed information on each person completing the test including the time they spent on the test, average time taken per task, average page views per task, their IP address, their user agent or browser and the date they completed the test.

Loop11 - Participants screen

Overall I think the results that you get are pretty comprehensive and will allow some very worthwhile followup actions to be completed to improve the user experience of your web site.

The pricing of Loop11 has still to be announced and, if the pricing is not too steep and indications that I have received from Loop11 are that it will be a reasonable price per test, my belief is that you will get a lot of great feedback that will easily pay for the cost of the test as long as you think carefully about the tasks and questions that you set for any participants.

Update (26th August) – I have been informed that pricing for Loop11 will be set at $350 USD per project, which includes unlimited tasks and questions and up to 1,000 participants. This pricing will be in place once the private beta concludes on 1st September.

I am carrying out a review of Loop11, a new web-based user experience testing tool and would be very grateful for your input.

Loop 11 allows you to conduct online, unmoderated user testing on your web site. It is not a survey or web analytics tool, but a user experience tool [...]]]>

Loop11 - User Experience Tool

I am carrying out a review of Loop11, a new web-based user experience testing tool and would be very grateful for your input.

Loop 11 allows you to conduct online, unmoderated user testing on your web site. It is not a survey or web analytics tool, but a user experience tool and is aimed at helping you to understand user behaviour.

There are several of these types of tools being released and Loop11 is currently in private beta although is due to be released to the general public soon.

I would be extremely grateful if you could complete a short, 3 step test for me so that I can collect some results and finish my review of the Loop11 user experience tool.

In order to carry out this short test, please click on the link below:

http://www.loop11.com/usability-test/1330/introduction/

Thank you for taking part and please look out for our full review of this usability (or user experience) testing software coming soon by signing up to our RSS feed or following us on Twitter.

LinkAlarm is a web-based link checking application that has been around for over 10 years and scans your web site checking each and every link on each web page. You can have LinkAlarm check your links once a week, once a month or you can run the scan manually whenever [...]]]>

LinkAlarm - Link Checking software

LinkAlarm is a web-based link checking application that has been around for over 10 years and scans your web site checking each and every link on each web page. You can have LinkAlarm check your links once a week, once a month or you can run the scan manually whenever you like.

So the principle of LinkAlarm is straightforward enough, let’s see how it performs.

Signing Up

You can register for a free account, which is a 14 day trial that gives you enough credit (more on credit later) to check links on up to 100 pages.

Registering is easy enough, a few details about you (your name, email address and how you found LinkAlarm) and your web site (the URL, how often you would like to check – once only, weekly, every 2 weeks or monthly and the category of your web site).

Once you have registered you are presented with a screen with a welcome message, your site details and a further message saying that your site will be checked in 5 minutes and notification of the report will be emailed once finished.

LinkAlarm - Welcome Message

I waited 5 minutes and nothing happened, no email. So I went back to the screen and read it again. It appears I had ignored some text that said ‘Please continue by confirming the entry of your site’ but there was no confirm site button and I had got confused. I clicked on the ‘Site Control’ link so see what that did and was presented with a page where it said ‘Checking’ in flashing green text. Good enough for me, I’ll leave it a little while and see what happens.

LinkAlarm - Checking Site

So, whilst that is running let me explain how the pricing structure of LinkAlarm works.

You pay for credits to be added to your account and then every time you run a report (either manually or automatically) LinkAlarm deducts 1 cent for each page of your web site. So if you have a 20 page web site you will pay 20 cents every time a report runs.

In my book that is pretty good value but is obviously more expensive for larger web sites and how often you want LinkAlarm to scan your site.

About half an hour later I received an email from LinkAlarm with the results and links to access more detailed reports online.

The Results

Within the email that LinkAlarm sends to you there is a section displaying your overall link check results. So my Testing Web Sites blog has 18 pages (still pretty small but growing) with a score of 64 and a failure of 3.7% (oh dear, really?). I had spotted that the category average for my web site is 2.5% so a failure percentage of 3.7% is a bit embarrassing and worrying. Let’s have a look at that in some more detail.

The email also gives you a number of statements (I won’t list them all here), which give you a quick impression of how well your web site performs in terms of internal links, external links and an overall score.

So, here are a couple of statements from the scan completed for www.testing-web-sites.co.uk, the comments are my comments relating to each statement:

Of the 18 pages checked, 18 (or 100%) were found to have one or more alarms.

Comment – so there is something broken on every page of my web site, great.

LinkAlarm checked 53 internal links and found 1 (or 2%) need attention.
Internal links are URLs that point to files inside your site.

Comment – there is 1 link that has a problem and it is probably on multiple pages, which is why I am getting such a high failure percentage.

LinkAlarm also checked 29 external links and found 2 (or 7%) need attention.
External links are URLs that point to files outside your site.

Comment – again, just 2 links that need attention but a high percentage because of the relatively low number of external links I have in place at present.

The LinkAlarm Score for this site (64) is an average of the page and alarm
ratios above. A score of 100 indicates all links checked reported no alarms.

Comment – I am guessing at the moment that a score of 64 is not great.

The link failure rate for this site (3.7%) is worse than
the benchmark link failure rate of 2.5% for the category – Computers & Internet.

Comment – I had spotted that too so will look into those failing links now to see what is wrong.

What the email from LinkAlarm also gives you is an understanding of what it would cost to run this report regularly on your web site plus links to their order form to order some credits. The costs are based on the number of pages and how often the report is run, for example, once each week. As I explained above the costs are based on 1 cent per page so if my web site stays at 18 pages then it would cost 18 cents to run each report or just under $10 each week for a year, not exactly big bucks.

It is helpful to know how much it is likely to cost to keep LinkAlarm checking my site but the only problem I have with this costing model is that I am aiming to grow my web site a lot over the next few months and so my costs to run LinkAlarm will continue to grow as the number of pages in my site increases.

So let’s have a look at the report now.

The Report

A screenshot of the LinkAlarm report summary

As mentioned in the email, the report gives you a summary first and the average for your category.

Then comes an Alarm Summary that shows the type of link failure for internal links, external links and total links. As you can see one of my internal links has a 405 error, which is Method Not Allowed. If you don’t know what this is then there is some handy help text available to give you an explanation.

405 Method Not Allowed means:
Common Alarm. Most commonly seen in ACTION links on FORMs where the server has not been configured to allow POST operations.

What you can do: Enable the ACTION for the correct location in your server configuration.

Clicking on the number of links shows me the pages that LinkAlarm found with the Method Not Allowed issue. This problem is being picked up on a PHP script relating to the posting of comments and is found on 7 of my 18 pages. At first glance this looks like an issue to do with my Wordpress blog or perhaps the theme that I am using, which will need further investigation and is unfortunately outside the scope of this review.

Now let’s have a look at the external links, the 2 errors are showing as 403 Forbidden. Again, some help text gives us a description of what that type of error is.

403 Forbidden means:
Common Alarm. The server will not provide the requested file. Commonly seen where content from an intranet has been made publicy available on the public internet or when your link points to a directory on a server and that server is configured to not provide directory listsings.

What you can do: Remove protection or provide and index file in the directory if necessary.

Both issues relate to links in the footer of each page of my blog, linking to the theme’s author. Clicking on those links manually does not result in a 403 Forbidden message but obviously LinkAlarm was getting that response.

So how does this happen? My view is that my theme’s author’s web site has some checking in place that works out if an automated bot is trying to access its pages and maybe responds with a different response code (403 in this case) than if my browser were trying to access the page.

This gives me a bit of a problem in trying to tidy up my LinkAlarm report because the software is going to think there are issues every time the report runs whereas in actual fact there does not appear to be any issues with the quality of my external links. This problem then is also not going to be restricted to just LinkAlarm but will extend to other link checking software too.

LinkAlarm, however, allows you to ignore certain pages or URLs and so you can maintain a list of any links such as the ones above. After ignoring the 2 external links that were producing incorrect 403 errors I ran the report again. This time I got a much more satisfactory result of 1.3% failure rate and an overall score of 86. There is now just that 1 internal link to investigate and deal with.

Other Features

It is worth detailing some of the other main features that you get as part of your LinkAlarm account, as follows:

History – shows you the history of the reports run with a graphic and summary information. Useful to see the improvement or worsening of your link check reports over time.

Download – you can download reports as zip files so you can keep copies of reports for later use.

Ignore URLS – as mentioned above.

Checking Limits – you can limit the number of pages that LinkAlarm checks if you want to. May be useful for larger sites that could stretch into hundreds or even thousands of pages.

Password Access – LinkAlarm can check password protected sites so useful for Intranets or web sites still in development.

Sites – the ability to add multiple sites to LinkAlarm so you can have it regularly checking all of your web sites using the same overall account. A good feature for agencies or larger companies who maintain a number of web sites.

LinkAlarm screenshot showing sites feature

Conclusion

Regularly link checking is a good thing and means that you are able to pick up on any link quality or linkrot problems at an early stage. Just the report run today on Testing Web Sites has raised some interesting items.

There is, however, only so much that any automated link checking software can do and this highlights the point about manually checking each and every link when you first complete an update to your web site or add a new page or blog post.

LinkAlarm is easy to set up and its free account enables you to start checking links very quickly. The ongoing costs are not great for smaller web sites but I wonder how LinkAlarm would perform for large, dynamic web sites such as an ecommerce site where they are potentially thousands of individual pages (although you can limit the number of pages or check specific pages if you want to).

The additional features that you get mean that LinkAlarm is worth considering for a wide variety of different companies and I will be continuing to use it unless I can find a better alternative.

Overall, I would recommend LinkAlarm for static web sites and possibly some further testing would be needed for larger and database driven web sites.

There are many different tools out there that can make life easier when it comes to all forms of testing web sites from HTML and CSS validation services to browser compatibility testing, link checking and stress or load testing.

We have started a collection of web testing tools, web-based and software [...]]]>

Browser Compatibility Testing using Browsershots

There are many different tools out there that can make life easier when it comes to all forms of testing web sites from HTML and CSS validation services to browser compatibility testing, link checking and stress or load testing.

We have started a collection of web testing tools, web-based and software applications that will point you in the right direction in order to make the testing of web sites that little bit more straightforward.

Recent additions to the list include a couple of web-based usability testing tools called Loop11 and UserTesting that both aim to take some of the hassle out of usability testing and gaining the views and opinions of real users actually using your web site. Look out for reviews of both of these online tools coming soon.

We will continue to keep you informed as the testing tools list expands and more excellent tools are added plus any reviews or impressions as they become available.

If you have a testing tool or software application used for testing web sites that you would like to add to the list then please contact us to let us know and we will add it as soon as we can.