Joe's Dot-Com Garage

Even Web experts find such maintenance tools useful. When Preferred Brands International, a $4-million company that sells Indian and Thai ready-to-eat entrées, launched an E-commerce site, in 1998, Webmaster Akila Iyer had no trouble keeping track of all her pages and making sure the links worked. As www.tastybite.com grew, however, Iyer found it more difficult to keep up with maintenance of the site, on which the company sells its Indian food. "Because it's a specialty market, we do need to make sure anything we have up there is user-friendly," she says. When some customers complained about broken links for sending E-mail, Iyer signed up with NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox service, which automatically checks links.

Slow-as-molasses downloading. Long downloading times drive customers off sites, period. "We feel that if a page is taking more than 30 seconds to load, there's a high chance of abandonment," says Johns of Resource Marketing. Others think that the time window is even smaller. If Web pages take more than 8 seconds to load, sites lose about a third of their visitors, says NetMechanic's Morgan.

To combat slow downloading, NetMechanic offers GIFBot, an image-optimization tool. GIFBot works by reducing the size of GIF and JPEG images on a Web page. Berman, the telemarketing-company owner, uses it to compress his graphics so that his site, www.ajba.com, will load more quickly. "It's a nice, quick interface that will show you several images and the compression levels, so you can select the one you want," he says.

What site? Finally, not only may visitors have problems when they reach a site, but they may not be able to see the site at all. "Just because it's up for you doesn't mean that anyone else can see it," says Brett Error, chief technology officer at MyComputer.com. There are many on-ramps to the Internet, and some may become blocked and cut customers off from viewing your site. To deal with that situation, both MyComputer.com and NetMechanic offer tools that help business owners determine whether their sites are widely accessible. For instance, MyComputer's WatchDog monitors Web sites round the clock, checking them as frequently as every two minutes. It also has five locations around the globe from which it can verify that a site is available. With that information in hand, site owners can demand better service from their hosting companies and, in turn, give better service to their customers.

Maintaining a Web site poses many challenges for the small-business owner playing Webmaster. But these simple, low-cost tools can fix performance problems, making it easier for customers to get their shopping carts down those virtual checkout aisles.

Rachael King is a freelance writer based in Glen Ridge, N.J.

Comparing the Mechanics

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