SQL Server Magazine

Microsoft Site Server 2.0 is a suite of tools for creating and managing Web sites. This product might appeal to large corporations, but companies that specialize in creating Web sites will find it especially valuable.

Site Server's four basic components are the Site Analyst, Usage Analyst, Personalization System, and Commerce Server. Site Analyst helps map, manage, and maintain Web sites. Usage Analyst imports HTTP log files to a SQL Server database and generates numerous canned reports of site activity. The Personalization System tracks user-specific Web browsing and helps customize the information a user sees on subsequent visits. Commerce Server extends Internet Information Server (IIS) with commerce-specific features to define a storefront, display products, and take orders electronically. These components have predefined views that Web masters can customize. I'll discuss only the Site Analyst and Usage Analyst modules in this article.

Site Analyst
Site Analyst is an impressive tool that you can use to examine your own or others' Web sites. It can map Internet sites and sites you've stored on a local or network drive. You provide the path or URL of the Web site to analyze, and the tool explores and maps every page, link, graphic, sound byte, and video in the site's pages. As you watch, Site Analyst slowly creates a site map on your monitor and can copy the map to your local disk. I felt like a voyeur watching the IRS Web site unfold, and I understand why common Internet etiquette views copying Web sites as unethical.

Site map and site summary. After installing Site Server's sample local site, I decided that a better test of the product would be to point it to a live site on the Internet. I typed in the URL for the Windows NT Magazine Web site and checked the options to verify offsite links and create a summary report.

As I watched Site Analyst create a map of the magazine's Web site, I developed a new respect for Web masters. Screen 1 shows the hypertext Web site summary report. The Windows NT Magazine Web site is 9 levels deep and contains 1244 pages, 4015 links, and 1948 images. Keeping this data (not to mention the Java applets, Lab Cam, and other dynamic applications) current and correct is a demanding job.

The summary report includes links to other detailed reports, such as Pages, Hierarchy, Images, Media, Gateways, InLinks, and Index. On the index report, you can click a button to remove the page icons from an alphabetized list of the contents and thus create the publishable version of a site index. This feature might be valuable for some sites, but as the five Back to the Future entries show in Screen 2, page 88, a ready-to-go index requires each link to have a unique description. For the Windows NT Magazine Web site, the summary report created 202 HTML files and consumed 9.5MB of disk space.

Cyberbolic view. Site Analyst has two display modes: a tree view and a cyberbolic view. Screen 3, page 88, shows both views for the Windows NT Magazine Web site. The left pane presents a traditional folder (tree) view, and the right pane shows the cyberbolic view, which probably looks familiar to FrontPage users. In the cyberbolic view, the magazine's home page is the W in pink at the bottom of the screen. A new feature in Site Analyst is the ability to dynamically move the view to uncover objects at the outer edge of the display (pages that are many levels deep). When you select an object, you can drag it to display links that are otherwise invisible. You can also orient the view so that the home page is in the center or at the left of the screen. Double-clicking a page launches your default browser to display the page.

You might want to view only the pages on a Web site, or you might want to see the graphics, sound bytes, and video. To fine-tune the display, select View, Display Options. Select Enable or Disable for the nine display options (Applications, Audio, Gateways, Images, Internet Services, Text, Unrecognized, Video, and Webmaps). Options are color-coded, so you can easily decipher a complex Web site if you enable all options. Broken links appear in red.

In the cyberbolic view, you can control the type and size of the labeling font. If you want to print this view, you need to increase the font size because the default 4-point type is difficult to read.

Viewing and correcting links. You can easily determine which links a page includes. In the tree or cyberbolic view, right-click an object and choose Links to see all the URLs on the page, or choose InLinks to see links on other pages that point to the selected page. To customize the data that Site Analyst displays for links, click the Columns button and include or exclude fields as needed. When the link view is up, you can highlight other pages in the tree or cyberbolic view to have Site Analyst automatically update information for the new object.

Site Analyst has built-in search options to locate objects by various criteria (e.g., title, URL, hidden objects, load size). The custom search option lets you search by three sort criteria, including numerous HTML tags. You can search the whole site or just displayed pages.

Web masters will appreciate Site Analyst's ability to build a site map and verify links. The mapping option to verify and correct broken onsite links is typical. The option to verify offsite links ensures that your reference sites are correct.

Other Site Analyst features. The Site Analyst User's Guide provides concise information about additional Site Server features. For example, Chapter 8, "Site Management Tips and Techniques," clearly documents the procedures for many tasks that are common to Web management, maintenance, and analysis, including

• Remapping a site to graphically view customizations you made to the previous map

• Providing information about objects that are new, changed, or orphaned

• Comparing maps for two versions of a site to see changes

• Refining helper applications to launch your favorite HTML editor or to view pages in different browsers

• Checking image ALT strings or page load sizes

• Exporting the tree view of the site map to create a hyperlink table of contents

• Creating a hyperlink site index from the Site Summary Report

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