Disclaimer - This post is about the announcement of my pet project - http://www.iCheckWebsite.com

From past few weeks I was focusing on my pet project, iCheckWebsite.com. I was wearing many hats - product owner, scrum master, designer, occasional developer and tester. It was fun and our shiny new version is live now :-) Wearing so many hats was/is difficult and to be honest - it probably means compromising little bit. But hey, it’s okay for self funded start-ups to compromise a little bit. Iterations are not long and hopefully in every new iteration - product will become better and better.

So let me explain what is iCheckWebsite, it’s core idea and how it could be extremely useful for testers working in the web application domain.

iCheckWebsite is an on-demand test automation and content monitoring tool for websites . iCheckWebsite makes it extremely easy to test and monitor content of websites for accessibility compliance, search engine optimisation and quality.

Let’s talk about test automation in this post and cover content monitoring some other time.

iCheckWebsite is an extremely simple tool for testing websites. In terms of capabilities, it is not as capable as Selenium or WATIR - but it is extremely simple. If we choose the analogy of a robot - Selenium, WATIR, Sahi and other tools are like toolkits. You can create different types of robots with these toolkits according to your need - if you have technical expertise, resources & time.

iCheckWebsite on the other hand is a ready-made robot and you can start using it in less than 30 seconds. But, this robot will perform only those checks which are built into this. With iCheckWebsite, you do not need to learn any new tool, scripting language or framework - you just need to use it or schedule it and look at the reports.

iCheckWebsite is a combination of crawler, scheduler and rule engine. It makes it extremely easy to perform many interesting checks on entire website. It does not matter if it’s a five page website or 10000 pages portal - you will need less than a minute to specify what you need to check and then just wait for the results. It’s a web based tool so you don’t need to download, install or configure before using it - all you need is a browser,Internet connection and around one minute.

Some of the checks which can be performed using iCheckWebsite are * There should not be any broken link on the page. * HTML / xHTML and CSS of the pages should be valid. * Headers / Footers should be consistent in all the pages. * Search box (or any other control) should be present on all the pages. * All the images, videos and objects should have alt text associated with them.

These are just some examples - there are many more checks which are related to accessibility, search engine optimisation and quality. Have a look at this short video and see how easy it is to start using iCheckWebsite.

Useful? Interesting? Doubts? Suggestions? Confusing? Feel free to give me your feedback @ anand AT iCheckWebsite DOT com

iCheckWebsite can be used in many interesting ways and in many scenarios such as - * Website is migrated to a new platform and you need to ensure sanity of website & content after migration. * Content is produced on the daily / hourly basis and you need to ensure that content follow good practices of SEO and accessibility. * You are testing websites on utest, 99tests and need to go through few checks instantly. * Sanity testing on the pre-prod, test environment and so on.

Probably most of us have been or are part of the projects where these things make sense. So why not give it a go - there is a decent free plan to get you started.

It would be great to get feedback on iCheckWebsite - feel free to give me your feedback in the comments or email me @ anand AT icheckwebsite DOT com