Web Site Maestro - 6.6.1

I’ve been using Web Site Maestro for quite some time now. I don’t remember when I started using it or which revision was current them. Actually, I started with HTML-Optimizer Pro. I was using Fetch at the time and so I didn’t go for the full-sized version of the shareware, Web Site Maestro. I just used HTML-Optimizer Pro and did my uploads with Fetch. I’d never used any other FTP client than Fetch and I knew how to use it. Occasionally I still use it for something but, since I switched from HTML-Optimizer Pro to Web Site Maestro, I normally use the FTP feature in Web Site Maestro. That’s because it figures out for me what to upload and where to put it. I don’t have to remember everything that I’ve changed when it’s time for an upload. That’s a big deal because I’m likely to change lots of files in lots of folders and then forget what I changed. Indeed, when I first started using the FTP feature in Web Site Maestro, I thought that there was something wrong with it because it was uploading things that I thought it shouldn’t be uploading. I started checking. It turned out that Web Site Maestro was uploading things that I’d changed and forgot to upload. My websites were out-of-date and I didn’t even know it. Worse yet, there were lots of obsolete files that I’d replaced with different files that had different names. Even when I remembered to upload the new files, I still forgot to delete the old ones with the different names. Web Site Maestro fixed all of that for me. Not only that, it’s easy to switch from one website to the next, and do them one after the other. Since I have lots of websites, that’s handy.

Each user will find his own favorite aspect of Web Site Maestro. Although the “fix everything” capability of the FTP feature is nice, my real favorite is the feature that checks for broken links. For me, it’s a life-saver. I literally couldn’t do some of the things that I do without it. I have several websites with hundreds of links between them. Each website has many levels of folders within folders and the links, even within the same website, go everywhere. When I decide to do some major reorganization of a website, which I do more frequently than is good for me, I can end up with hundreds of broken links. Without Web Site Maestro, finding all of those broken links would be a nightmare. Fixing them would be impossible. Can you imagine scrolling slowly through dozens of files and checking hundreds of links manually, looking for broken ones? My mind would go so blank that I’d probably become a zombie. Web Site Maestro finds them, tells me where they are, and tells me which ones they are. It even checks off-site links. I make changes now, casually, knowing that Web Site Maestro will find the resulting broken links, that I’d never have even dreamed of attempting before Web Site Maestro.