Greetings, readers! ZooNews is back after a two-month summer hiatus. Welcome to the August 2010 issue, from professional website design company Zoonini Web Services.

I hope everyone's been having a fantastic summer, whether you've taken it easy or been busier than ever.

One of the things many of us neglect on our sites is conducting regular dead-link checks. It's important to make sure every link on your site is in good working order – especially if you link to a lot of external sites. Websites get revamped, site structures change, and there's nothing worse than clicking on a link expecting to see the information you were promised, but getting a big fat 404 File Not Found error instead.

Here are some free tools to help with this essential – but let's face it, pretty unglamourous – task:

• Xenu's Link Sleuth is for PCs only and has an interface about as pretty to look at as the underside of a busy dog-walker's shoe, but it's remarkably intuitive, effective, and fast. I often power up the PC emulator on my Mac solely to run this program.
• Site Orbiter is a Mac tool that does the trick nicely.
• The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) offers a serviceable web-based link-checker.
• If you run your site on WordPress, the Broken Link Checker plug-in can monitor dead links on an ongoing basis. Links can even be "edited directly from the plug-in's page, without manually updating each post." Very handy.

Whatever method you use, detecting and fixing broken links on a regular and frequent basis is a worthwhile task that will make your site look more professional and ensure that your visitors are a happier bunch!

One of the things new bloggers sometimes have trouble wrapping their heads around at first is the difference between blog categories and tags.

I often compare categories to the chapters of a book. A cookbook, for example, may have chapters divided into Appetizers, Main Dishes, Side Dishes, and Desserts. These are comparable to a blog's categories: broad groupings by topic.

On the other hand, a cookbook's index lists individual ingredients – e.g. carrots, chocolate, chicken – with a list of pages that mention that ingredient below each item. These are similar to the tags on a blog post.

Some blogs use only categories, some use tags, while others use both or even none.

Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.

For Michael Bungay Stanier's Coaching For Great Work website, WordPress was our content-management system of choice. WordPress's posts functionality allows the client to easily add new upcoming workshops, and we've configured past events to drop off the list automatically. WordPress categories are used for the event location, so visitors can quickly find workshops by country. Sliding panels on the homepage allowed us to present four screens of information on this international coaching-training program in an interesting and easy-to-read fashion.

In just a couple of weeks, I'm slated to help demystify WordPress for new users. The goal is to assist folks in getting a handle on the key basics of this powerful but user-friendly content management system. In tandem with colleague Shannon Smith of Café Noir Design, I'll be presenting A Beginner's Guide to WordPress at WordCamp Montreal, on August 28-29. Tickets are only $40 for the entire two-day conference, including one lunch and a T-shirt. I hope to meet some ZooNews readers there!

À la prochaine,

kp
aka Kathryn Presner