Web Checkers and Validators
By Gary Ferrington

A web site is only as good as it functions downstream from the server on which you have it housed. There are a number of free web site validators and checkers that will help you maintain the effectiveness of your site. Most of these offer advanced services for a fee that may also be of value to your work as a web developer.

Anybrowser.com provides a screen checker that lets you see how your web site looks on different screens including: 600X480, 544x384, 640x480, 800x600.

Bobby allows you to test web pages and help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourages compliance with existing accessibility guidelines, such as Section 508 and the W3C's WCAG.

Mikes-Marketing-Tools provides a free Link Popularity Checker that provides an instant, online report of a site's link popularity rating in 5 top search engines, including Google, MSN (Inktomi), AllTheWeb (FAST), AltaVista, & Teoma (Ask Jeeves) Link Popularity is the number of links pointing to a web site. The higher your web site's link popularity, the better, as most major search engines consider it as an important factor in determining a web page's ranking.

Optiview has a "Cool Tools" section to test loading speeds and other features of a web site."PageRacer" allows you to see how fast your web page downloads at 56k—with and without optimization. "QuickScan" will check the first 10 pages of your Web site for bloated and duplicate images that slow Web page loading. "Line Speed Tester" shows you how fast your Internet connection really is when viewed from different areas in the country.

Web Design Group provides a service by which you can check the effectiveness of your Cascading Style Sheets, CSSCheck is primarily a CSS1 checker. Many CSS2 properties are supported, but new CSS2 selectors will generate errors. The Web Design Group also provides a resource page of additional validators and checkers worth exploring.

W3C provides "MarkUp Validation Service"; a free service that checks documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. The site also has a CSS validator, WDG validator, Link Checker and other tools. The Link Checker is one of my favorite tools.