Weaving the Web: Check for Broken Links and Orphaned Files with Dreamweaver
Most websites at Boise State University are in a constant state of construction. Web editors build, polish, refinish, lay new foundations, and remodel content year after year in response to changing needs and standards of departments, colleges, the University, web browsers, and audiences. Several different hands may often be required to work on a site; over time, each of these hands may tear down and build anew.
Looking at our University web servers today, OIT sees a lot of debris left over from untended sites. Orphaned files float lonely amongst the ether, broken legacy code produces undesirable results in a modern web browser, and dead links that haven’t been tested or updated in years offer readers a one-way trip to nowhere.
Fortunately, there are tools available to help you find these orphaned files and dead links, and give you a leg up on cleaning up your website. Adobe Dreamweaver, one of the most popular website editors available, has several of these maintenance tools built in.
First, a word about Dreamweaver; I’ve been a devoted Dreamweaver user since Macromedia first introduced the software in 1997. Macromedia sold Dreamweaver to Adobe after release of Dreamweaver version 8, and Adobe released the most recent version of Dreamweaver, CS3, in 2007.
One complaint I’ve heard over the years is that Dreamweaver isn’t easy to use because of its “learning curve.” While the first few versions of Dreamweaver certainly looked different than most other web editors on the market, people tend to forget that almost every web editor looked different from any other during the initial heyday of designing for the web. That Dreamweaver has persevered and continues to be a best-selling web design product is the result of its flexibility and standards-based evolution; today’s Dreamweaver can be configured for easy use by both novice and seasoned web designers.
Fix Broken Links
Let’s start with checking for broken hyperlinks within your website. Broken links are links that don’t correctly refer to other pages due to a misspelling or incorrect pathing in the hyperlink, or refer to a file or page that no longer exists.
To search for all instances of broken links in your site, choose Site > Check Links Sitewide from the Dreamweaver menu bar
Dreamweaver will scan your site. After a few moments, you’ll get a detailed report:
Each file containing a broken link is displayed in the Files column. The broken link is listed in the Broken Links column. Double-click a file to open it and correct the link, then upload the corrected file to the web server.
(The OIT Help Desk highly recommends you save and edit your files on your local computer, then upload the files to your web server; editing your files directly on the server is a recipe for frustration and disaster).
Find Orphaned Files
Click the drop-down box on the link checker window you used to see your broken links and choose Orphaned Files.
Any files listed aren’t linked to by any other files, most likely because they’re obsolete or created and then abandoned before you linked to them. If they’re no longer necessary, archive or delete these files, and make sure they’re not lingering on the web server.
Next week we’ll look at using the Site Reports feature in Dreamweaver to easily clean up your HTML.
