Linkpatch is a web app designed for people like me who are on a mission to find bad links. Once installed, it sends you an email whenever a user encounters a 404 (page not found) error page on your web site.

Installation

The most difficult part of using Linkpatch is installing the code for the tracking script on your web site. Linkpatch works in a similar way to a statistics package like Google Analytics, except that the tracking script is only installed on your site’s 404 page.

Linkpatch’s installation instructions assume you do not already have a custom 404 page on your site and shows you how to create one. My site already had a custom 404 page. This saved me the step of creating one, but made installing the script itself a little more complex.

The instructions from Linkpatch for installing the tracking script describe placing it in relation to certain HTML tags on the 404 page. Unfortunately, my page template was coded without using those tags. Using educated guesswork, I tried several positions for the code’s placement. The tracking script worked in the first position, but made the 404 page display as blank to visitors. Finally, I found a location where the script worked and didn’t disable the display of the page’s contents.

Usage

After installation, I started receiving emails notifying me when 404 errors were occurring. Notifications are limited to one for each referral per broken URL per day. This is good, because it means that one bad link won’t result in an avalanche of notifications in your inbox.

The error emails (contents pictured above) are extremely detailed. They include the broken address, the referral source (so you can see whether the broken link is on your site or elsewhere), and details on the user’s location, browser and operating system. There is also  the option of viewing the errors on the Linkpatch web site in a less detailed error log.

A very simple web dashboard (pictured below) controls Linkpatch. Through this dashboard, email delivery can be turned off if you’d prefer to only read your error reports online. Other available options, which I haven’t tried, include the blocking of recording of errors from certain directories or the ability to ignore errors that don’t have a referring page.

Pricing

There are several levels of account available from Linkpatch. A free account is available that will monitor one site for errors. Premium accounts start at $10 per month for monitoring of up to five web sites, and go up to $75 per month for monitoring of up to 150 web sites. Discounts are available for paying annually. The free account that I tried took only a few minutes to set up, and didn’t require a credit card number.

Linkpatch has been very helpful in my hunt for broken URLs on my new site. If you’re concerned about hunting down broken links, Linkpatch is a great tool to employ.

What tools do you use for hunting down broken links?

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After signing up, you have three options for adding the VisitorContact form to your site. The first is copying and pasting some generated JavaScript into your site’s code. When visitors click the button, they’ll receive the popup form as the next image shows.

If you don’t want to use the JavaScript method, you can use an iframe. This just pastes the entire form into the page, without using the button.

The third and final method is a WordPress plugin that works like the JavaScript method, except you don’t have to copy and paste the code (Disclosure: WordPress is a product of Automattic, a company that is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True Ventures). You just upload the plugin, activate it and enter the form ID provided by the VisitorContact web site.

As you can see in the image above, the contact form displays your basic contact information, address, Twitter and Skype IDs. You can choose to publish all or some of this information. If you include your address, the contact form displays a Google Map pointing out your location. You can customize the form using VisitorContact’s design options and change the background color, hover color and screen placement of the form to match your site’s theme.

VisitorContact also has an autoresponder option that will send an acknowledgment email to any visitor who uses your contact form. It’s an opportunity to connect, send a “thank you” gift, or simply let the sender know the form reached you.

You can edit your forms through VisitorContact’s simple dashboard, which also gives you access to the JavaScript embed codes  and the list of recent contacts (without email addresses).

After your form has received 50 messages, you can export the data containing contact names and email addresses. Until you reach the magic number of 50, you can only view an online list with names, location and the form name.

When a visitor emails you through the form, you’ll receive a simple email complete with their details, including IP address, as the next screenshot shows:

VisitorContact is a good option for quickly adding contact details to a site and works well, with one exception. If a visitor makes a mistake entering the spam-protecting CAPTCHA code, the contents of the form are wiped, meaning they’ll have to start over. I think the information in the form should stay put to avoid aggravating users.

How do you include contact information on your site?

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Which is why it’s refreshing to see that Tank is different. It’s easy to use, the basic version is free, and in the right hands, it’s capable of producing some pretty good results. If you need to put together a quick site with some fairly static pages for one of your projects or a client, it’s worth taking a look. Mike Gunderloy briefly covered Tank here on WWD a year ago and liked what he saw. According to Tank co-founder Alan Alston, they’ve come a long way since then, so I thought I’d take it for a test run.

Getting started with Tank is simple. After filling out the registration form, you’re taken to a couple of screens to set up your site. There you’ll need to input some basic information, such as the site name, tag line, etc.:

Setting up the site in Tank

You then pick the default structure (“information architecture”) for your site (you can customize this later, but the defaults should cover most types of sites):

Choosing an Information Architecture for our site

Your site is now set up at a custom URL (under the “withtank.com” domain for free users; paid users can select their own domain). Your site looks pretty good out of the box, with a nice, clean design, and comes with a bunch of pages already set up. For a “biz”-type site,  you get Home, What We Do, Where We Are, News And Gallery set up in the main navigation bar. Here’s my site (I selected the red color scheme, though you can customize it very easily):

The default site provided by Tank

To add content to one of these pages, you just click on the Sitemap, then the title of the page you want to edit. From there you can add or edit content via an easy-to-use interface.

Adding content is easy

You can also add extra pages and change the site’s structure in the Sitemap.

You have the option of adding blog-like content under the News tab. This is one area that I think could probably be improved on.  For example, for some reason, you have to put the title of the post on one page, and then add content on the next. This isn’t very intuitive, especially for someone used to working with a blogging CMS. If your site needs a blog, I would recommend going with one of the established blogging engines instead.

The final tab, Gallery, is used for managing images. Images are organized into albums, in a similar manner to sites like Facebook. If you want to batch upload many images you can put them all into a zip file — not as easy as the fancier uploaders found on sites like Flickr and Facebook. If you don’t want to zip them up, you have to upload them one at a time. Free users will quickly run into the 10MB limit if uploading a more than a few photos. The gallery works well on the site that I created.

Managing the gallery in Tank

For setting up a quick site, that’s pretty much it, and should take no more than an half an hour of your time.  Once your site is configured, you can customize it to your heart’s content, up to and including using your own CSS.

You can start using Tank with the free version, but if you want to use your own domain, or more storage, you’ll need a Basic or Pro plan, starting from $10 per month.

Tank is most suited to small portfolio-type sites, with a few pages with fairly static content. It’s probably not really suitable for a blog or dynamic sites with lots of content to manage.

If you need to put together a quick no-fuss five page site for a project, with decent results out of the box, it’s worth giving Tank a try.

Have you tried Tank?

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