WebSite-Watcher: Save Yourself Time with Automated Site Monitoring A Handy Time-Saving Tool Adam Stone
Wouldn't it be nice to see what the competition is up to without having to take time out of your daily routine to check a dozen Web pages for updates that might offer a clue as to your competitors' evolving business strategies?
Okay, maybe you never thought of checking their Web sites, but think about it. Competitors may be posting news of customer acquisitions, mergers, new products, or other vital information. And there's often valuable information right out there in the open world of the Web, available to anyone willing to take the time to look for it. Better still, with the right software tool, you don't need to take the time — you can simply let it do the work for you.
That's the premise behind WebSite-Watcher, a nifty application that periodically visits selected sites and notifies you when anything has changed. A free trial download is available, and registration for the program ranges from about $40 to $130 depending on the edition desired (options span from Basic to Pro).
What It Does
Tell WebSite-Watcher which Web sites you want to monitor, and it handles the rest. The software saves the last two versions to your hard disk and revisits the sites periodically, alerting you when a site has changed. Then, when you visit an updated site WebSite-Watcher highlights all changes in the text, making it extremely quick to identify new and revised information.
There are a slew of useful features built into WebSite-Watcher. Users can tell the program to ignore changes in numbers, for example. That means you won't get a notice every time a stock price moves by a tenth of a point.
And support for macros makes it possible for the application to check for changes taking place behind a login. Users can set the Watcher to seek out and highlight specific words within a Web site. Sophisticated filters allow for ignoring unimportant changes, such as new banners and advertisements. You can even exclude parts of a Website, or monitor only specific portions of a site.
Another selling point with WebSite-Watcher is that there's no need to launch a new browser window to view changes on Web sites. The program offers an integrated mini-browser (based on IE) that allows a user to view an updated Web page without leaving the main interface.
All the heavy labor can be conducted with barely any effort on the part of the user. Once configurations and preferences have been set, WebSite-Watcher's AutoWatch feature will check selected Web sites automatically, and will play a short .wav file sound when a revised site is detected.
