NetCarta’s WebMapper: O! What a Tangled Web We Unweave

Find your way around your Web site

The ability to group information any way you want is a compelling reason toprovide information through the Internet. Another reason is that you don't haveto duplicate information. If you have the information, a simple link to theinformation is all you need, and users can access it as if they were on theoriginal site.

Gone are the headaches of synchronizing information among multiple sitesand applying regular updates. Or are they?

How Do You Manage Multiple Links?
Consider this scenario. In afit of inspiration, you decide to create a page to help your company track the401K plan's mutual funds. You tell the big brass, and they are all for it.Surely fame and glory will follow.

You locate the resources and set up the page. It's a big success. Peoplebegin to rely on this system. You add features that let people compute theup-to-the-minute value of their 401K contributions, and everyone--and I meaneveryone--is using it.

Then the Web Master changes the universal resource locator (URL) at one ofthe numerous sites that supply your mutual fund information. You have to searchto find out which link it is. You have dozens of links, and as your sitematures, you will have hundreds.

So how do you manage such a site? Well, you can manually check every linkon your site. This tactic will take a large chunk of your day and is probablynot efficient. As the Web becomes the medium for global commerce, softwaredevelopers (are you listening?) must create new tools to cope with the uniquechallenges the Web presents.

An Overview of Your Web Site
Enter WebMapper from NetCarta. Itgives you an overview of everything on your Web site, including simple HypertextMarkup Language (HTML) pages, forms, audio clips, video clips, and CommonGateway Interface (CGI) scripts. This is one of those unique software packagesthat are so good that they hook you: Once you try WebMapper, you won't be ableto do without it.

A big part of being a site administrator is verifying the information youpost. You need to make sure that all your links are valid and functioningproperly. WebMapper excels at this task. As a test, I had WebMapper create a Webmap of the URL, www.winntmag.com/ home/index.dbm. Two minutes later, I had acomplete representation of the Windows NT Magazine Web site, which yousee in Screen 1.

Digging Deeper
Notice that this pass through WebMapper showsonly the first level. At the start, you can specify how deeply you wantWebMapper to look, or you can later tell it to explore n levels deepfrom any point in the original map.

Clicking a question mark tells WebMapper to go out and follow the links on aparticular page and further build the map. You can see how this step works bylooking at Screen 2, which shows the Hot Site page forwww.winntmag.com/home/index.dbm. This page is always changing, and to keep upwith valid links, we've relied on a variety of methods, including kludgedscripts, people power (in the form of helpful email from our readers), and ofcourse, the old manual method.

Now we have a convenient and efficient way to check whether links arevalid. Beginning with the map WebMapper created, we can highlight a startingpoint, the Hot Site page, and tell the product to explore from here nlevels deep. We also tell WebMapper to verify all external links. Ten minuteslater, we have the graphical representation that Screen 3 contains. It includesall the broken links in the Hot Site area.

Interfacing with Authoring Tools
Of course, WebMapperautomatically interfaces with all your favorite authoring tools. So fixing anybroken links is a breeze.

Another feature worth mentioning is the ability to explore a mapped site toan HTML file. The file is in list format, and it is indented for each level. Youcan, of course, print this information, which makes managing changes a snap.

The End of the Tour
This quick tour of this product'scapabilities barely scratches the surface of what WebMapper can do for a site.To dig deeper, you can download a trial version of WebMapper from NetCarta atwww. netcarta.com/merchant/wmreg.htm.

This is an outstanding product, and I have no hesitation in recommendingWebMapper. I regret that it can't print those gorgeous Web maps I've beentalking about, but I have to make due with just the HTML file. You have to haveWebMapper, but it costs $499, so you may have to figure out what to give up toget it.