Lesson 3.3: Checking
the Validity of Your Links
Do These Links Go Anywhere?
HTTP 404 Error: File Not Found.
With the web constantly changing, the links on your site are likely to go bad if not checked up on. Especially if others also work in your web folder, users can move a file around and unintentionally break a link on one of your pages. To make sure your visitors don't receive annoying 404 Error messages, you should check the validity of your links periodically. Rather than painstakingly verifying them by hand though, there are three shortcut methods to make sure your links are valid:
1. Using Dreamweaver's link checker
2. Using an external program (usually shareware)
3. Visiting a site that checks links
Using Dreamweaver's Link Checker
In Dreamweaver, you can check the validity of your links on just one page or even on your entire site. To check links in Dreamweaver, go to File > Check Links. If this is your first time checking them though, Dreamweaver will ask you to first define the site.
Defining a Site
To define a site, simply list the name of your website, or what you would remember your site as, as the Site Name, the location of your web files locally according to your computer (ie. using drive letters and such), and the URL of your site. For instance, if you were working on your homepage, you could name your Site Name "My Homepage", your Local Root Folder would be where your files for your homepage were located, and your HTTP Address (URL) would be the URL of your homepage. To help find your local root folder faster, you can click on the little yellow folder on the right of the text entry field. Click OK. You can choose to have Dreamweaver cache the file or not; link checking will work either way.
Checking Links
Once you have defined a site, it is very easy to check links in Dreamweaver. Simply go to File > Check Links. This step will check all the links in the current document and show all resulting broken links in the Link Checker window.
To check the links of an entire defined site, go to Site > Check Links Sitewide.
For both of these steps, any broken links will be listed by Dreamweaver. You can then go check up on them and find out where the missing linked files migrated to.
You can also use an external program to verify the links on your page. These programs are usually shareware, which means that they are free to try for a limited time, but that if you choose to continue to use them, you will have to buy them. A recommended simple link-checking software to try is Xenu's Link Sleuth. You can download a trial from cnet.com.
Other link-checking software you can try are listed at ZDNet.
You can also visit a link-checking site to check your links. These sites are usually free, but they can take a considerably longer time to validate your links than if you used a shareware program or Dreamweaver. One link-checking site to try is NetMechanic's Link Check.
Simply enter your URL, whether you want to check only one page or the entire site, and whether you want to have it check the links for you while you wait or, for larger projects, check the links in the background and e-mail you the results.
