The Most Annoying Yet Almost Most Important Task in Professional Website Management
Jens Meiert, October 16, 2008.
This entry is filed under Web Development, User Experience.
… is link checking. There are tools out there, en masse, however, it is just annoying to run after so-called professionals who neither know about simplest online rules nor how to set up redirects (but dare to waste other people’s time).
This doesn’t mean that me, I’m always handling this perfectly, but regularly doing QA it is quite striking to see that not just individuals but even service providers just change URIs without thinking – but maybe with the explicit goal to scare people away and lose potential customers. Link checking is a job that shouldn’t be necessary doing. Really, it shouldn’t (and yet it is).
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Comments
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On October 16, 2008, 8:50 CEST, Kroc Camen said:
Urgh, *raises hand* I’m totally bad at doing this. Just yesterday I found at that the URLs for enclosures in my RSS feed were wrong, and had been for weeks.
As an individual doing a personal project, I tend to just polish, polish and polish until I get to 99% and then “just ship it” and deal with the 1% failures afterwards
Note to developers:
CHECK THE 404S IN YOUR LOGS!
It’ll reveal a whole world of mistakes -
On October 16, 2008, 9:28 CEST, Robert said:
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On October 17, 2008, 11:08 CEST, Santhos said:
Yep, that’s totally true. I always do a double check on old links and redirect them through htaccess after I’ve made changes to site structures.
It can spare you lots of trouble and frustrated visitors (who might not come back again).
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On October 17, 2008, 16:16 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
Kroc, yeah, even though there are always some issues it’s good to check (and to make sure own pages don’t just get deleted).
Robert, oh my gosh …!
See you in court (to see me losing this case) … nah, appreciate it, nice one! (And that’s how it’s supposed to be, see something, have an idea, out with it 
)Santhos, nothing to add
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On November 11, 2008, 6:00 CET, Ann Arbor Web Designer said:
I couldn’t agree more with you. Its a tedious process but it pays rich dividends.
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On April 16, 2009, 5:08 CEST, hari said:
yap! I am agree with ann. That process was still needed
