Free site tuneup at new Web 'garage.'

MacWeek, Jan 26, 1998 by April Streeter

AtWeb's Web Site Garage analyzes Web sites and provides reports about a site's design, required download time and even spelling.

Webmasters who are struggling to stay on top of site maintenance and are worried about their sites' hidden flaws can park their pages at the Web Site Garage for a free tuneup.

Created by AtWeb Inc., a Web design company in Sunnyvale, Calif., and launched in November 1997 at http://www.websitegarage.com, Web Site Garage is a compendium of diagnostic tests Webmasters can run on their pages. The free service tests a page's load time under different modem speeds, looks for dead links, checks a page's spelling, counts how many links to the page exist on other Web pages and search services, and scans the page's HTML for errors.

Under the hood

There's no doubt these are important parameters for Webmasters to keep in mind. The 1997 WWW User Survey conducted by Georgia Tech Research Corp.'s Graphic Visualization and Usability Center of Atlanta found that speed continues to be the No. 1 surfer complaint. Fully two-thirds of the nearly 20,000 Web users who participated in the study said it takes too long to download many Web pages, and nearly half reported broken links on pages as their second-biggest problem (see 06.16.97, Page 1).

AtWeb's measuring tools aren't the only way to check a page's effectiveness. BBEdit from Bare Bones Software Inc. of Bedford, Mass., has long been popular with Webmasters for its HTML format checking. SiteMill from Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., groups together maintenance utilities, including one for testing link structure. Other offerings, such as the ImageVice Adobe Photoshop plug-in from BoxTop Software Inc. of Starkville, Miss., help reduce the size of graphics used on a site.

AtWeb said Web Site Garage has tuned more than 1 million Web pages since it came online two months ago. Users of the service attribute its popularity to the fact that, in addition to being free, the basic tuneup makes it easy for a site manager to get a handle on a page's effectiveness without spending time hunting down the various tools.

"I've done everything by myself in the past and ended up spending too much time working to find and then try out the tools," said Jim Faris, multimedia art director at Hollen Mark Martin Edmund Inc., a Boston-based advertising agency. "I used Web Site Garage to determine page download speed and as a way to reduce image sizes, and I would use it again and again, even if I had to pay to do so."

Tamir Scheinok, interactive designer and Webmaster at Entasis LLC in San Francisco, said Web Site Garage is impressive, if basic. "It is a really good way to learn about the basics of site development - as good as any algorithms could be," Scheinok said. At Entasis' first tuneup, Web Site Garage found a GIF file that had been saved with 64 colors instead of eight, which increased its size.

Looking good

"The danger is, however, that many folks might feel that after a tuneup and an 'excellent' rating from Web Site Garage they are done," Scheinok said. "But the most important areas of site design -the visual design and the strategy behind the design - can't really be tested procedurally. They require an experienced designer."

AtWeb founder Gauram Godhwani agreed that periodic tuneups aren't a replacement for good design, and AtWeb has a number of fee-based design consulting services.

But Godhwani said he believes his service is a maintenance starting point. AtWeb plans to add further diagnostics within the next few months, including a browser compatibility test that will view a page from all known browser versions and a "promoteability" test that will check keywords contained in HTML metatags to make sure they are formatted correctly. The updated service will also be able to tune an entire site rather than just a single page.

"Terms and tags and HTML designs are changing all the time, and designers using very advanced technology or esoteric terms might not see the value of the tuneup," Godhwani said. "But for the vast majority, a picture of a site judged by objective measures is very useful."