By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
January 31st, 2001

See Also   The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet   Alternative Payment Solutions   Fraud Prevention Tools   Top Tools to Help You Boost Customer Service   iV-Caller Verification Service   Make Your Price Sell!   FindWhat.com   Make Your Knowledge Sell!   HumanClick   Netship   iFulfill.com   Nexchange   Nothing But 'Net   Netwhistle.com   Bigstep.com   Make Your Site Sell!   AWeber   GoTo.com   Constant Contact   WebAdverts   PersonalStore   SiteInspector   LinkExchange   ClickTrade   Safe   eCHARGE   MilliCent

As promised, for this last article in the Online Customer Service series I'm going to take a look at some tools and services that can help you improve the experience of visitors in your Web store.

I've divided these products and services in to four categories:

• Products that will help you ensure that your site is free of errors.

• Products that will monitor your Web store and alert you if it goes offline or develops a fault.

• Products that will enable you to interact with visitors while they are browsing in your store.

• Companies to which you can outsource all or part of your customer service activities.

Keeping Your Site Free of Errors

In a previous article in this series, I explained why it was usually the simple mistakes that irritated customers the most. And basic site problems - slow download speeds, broken links, spelling mistakes, faulty HTML coding etc.- clearly fall in to this category of simple problems that can usually be fixed quickly and cheaply.

There are many tools and services available on line that will help you check a particular aspect of your site (for example HTML validation) but here I'm going to focus on a couple of products that provide a suite of tools to help you quickly check many key aspects of your site.

Web Site Garage

Web Site Garage provides two services of interest here, Tune Up and Gif Lube.

Tune Up runs five critical diagnostic checks on your Web pages:

• Browser Compatibility - verifies that your Web store will display correctly in different browsers and versions.

• Load Time Check - calculates theoretical load time based on speeds from 14.4K to T1.

• Dead Link Check - detects dead links.

• Spell Check - catches misspelled words (US English only).

• HTML Check - verifies your HTML coding against the 3.2 standard.

Gif Lube automatically reduces the size of images on your page, which will speed up the page loading time.

Pricing: Unknown! Web Site Garage has traditionally offered a free, one page service and then charged for subsequent pages. However, Web Site Garage is in the process of being absorbed in to Netscape's Netcenter and although the free, one page service is still available, all mention of pricing for larger numbers of pages has disappeared from their Web site. I'm sure that Netscape will fix this within the next few weeks though - may be they intend making the service totally free?

NetMechanic

NetMechanic offers a similar suite of tools as Web Site Garage with its HTML Toolbox and GIFBot services. One important difference is that as well as detecting HTML errors, HTML Toolbox is able to fix most errors it finds and can generate a repaired file for you to upload to your server.

Pricing: GIFBot is free. The HTML Toolbox is priced as follows:

5 or less pages	Free
6 - 100 pages	$35 per URL
101 - 400 pages	$200 per URL

Pricing for higher quantities of pages is available on request from NetMechanic.