[Sigia-l] Re: web site analyzer

[Bill Bell]

ram_ortiz at yahoo.es wrote, in part:

> I'm very interested about any software with funcionalities to measure
> the complexity of a website. Particulary I'm looking for a software
> tool which help me to identify possible structure deficiences, excesive
> deepth navigation until reach the content, page weigh, etc..  I'm more
> interested to analyze structural aspects rather than tracking visitor
> behaivour. 

Darned interesting question!

There are at least two kinds of complexity associated with a website: the complexity of the 
site as viewed by visitors and the complexity as seen by site maintenance personnel.

There is a substantial literature about measuring the complexity of software. However, from 
my perspective, dealing with the complexity of web sites _as software_ is more difficult than 
dealing with complexity in a lot of software systems.

Fortunately your query seems to be about complexity as seen by website visitors. 

There is an alternative that you might not have considered and that is to write simple program 
scripts to investigate sites (using Python or Perl, say). Long-term the cost of doing this might 
be greater but if you need, for example, to identify paths that users would find 
incomprehensibly long or complicated for only a few sites then this alternative might be viable 
for you. (Of the order of twenty lines of Python code could be enough to identify the "depth" of 
a site, for example, or even some measures of the distributions of depth.)

I notice that the advertising on the Maxamine site tends to blur the distinction between 
complexity as viewed by users and complexity as viewed by website builders and 
maintainers. For instance, consider the following passage:
 
"Reduce Site Maintenance Expense by up to 75%[:] Maxamine™s reports enable publishers 
and web team members to instantly identify site characteristics that contribute to negative 
visitor experiences. Thorough and detailed internal and external link checking reports 
facilitate immediate corrective action."
Of course software that can find broken links will certainly reduce maintenance cost (not to 
mention embarrassment and the costs relating to frustrated users). However, there are many 
aspects of maintenance cost that are unrelated to broken links and the code in typical 
commercial pages these days are quagmires.
My 2 cents worth--and a Canadian 2 cents at that.
Bill