Tools


6
Sep 05

Sorry, I can’t open your PSD/Photoshop file – Irfanview

How many times do you hear that somebody can’t view a Photoshop file because they don’t have Photoshop installed?

The solution is Irfanview, a freeware graphics viewer. Have them install it, and they’ll be able to take a quick peek at the file (but not manipulate it).


5
Sep 05

What is in my site?

A frequent question the web analyst has to answer is “what is in my site?” If you have access to the developer or the site’s server, you can easily create an outline of the site’s content.

Often, however, you’ll be limited to analyzing the site from a visitor’s standpoint. That’s where spider software comes in.

There are many good spiders available, but the most reliable and helpful is “Xenu Link Sleuth.” Despite the odd name, Xenu is a solid tool that spiders the whole site and creates useful reports for site structure and errors.

Tip: the report in HTML can take a long time to write and load in a browser (for large sites). I usually skip this step, and export as csv instead. Then I manipulate the csv results in Excel.


5
Sep 05

A tool to perform repeat data entry testing into a Web form

The “Scribe” extension in Firefox allows to save form entries before form submission (File/Save Entry) and then reload it again later on on the same page (File/Open entry). You can have multiple data sets for the same Web page.

This has great value on e-commerce projects, where tedious form information has to be reentered often.

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=102 (Get Firefox first)