Elsop's Company Tour

Welcome to Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop).

This page is intended to provide the press and other interested parties a comprehensive view of our company and its products via a tour of our website. You are invited to take the tour as we present it or skip about to where your interest and needs take you. I hope you will find everything you need here. If not, please feel free to contact me for more information or any assistance you might require. This page contains information about our primary product, LinkScan and includes brief descriptions of its two major functions: link validation and site mapping. The tour also includes information about our market, customers, pricing, competition, distribution, marketing, company background, company philosophy, officers and contact information.

LinkScan is a Hot Product - Product Overview

People who are not acquainted with the process of building and maintaining a world wide web site or an intranet web site may not appreciate why webmasters need a product like LinkScan.

Our studies show that most websites have significant problems. These include up to 30% of the external links being broken, missing files, orphaned pages, and faulty mailto addresses. Yet most webmasters are blissfully unaware that they even have these problems. Why? Because they don't regularly check their sites for these problems. In fact, in many cases, they have never, ever checked for these problems. The reason is that it is too time consuming and difficult to do manually. The solution is to use a link validator to test every link on the website.

LinkValidation

LinkScan is the industrial strength link checking and website management tool for Windows, Linux, Unix, and Macintosh O/S X operating systems. Elsop has tested extensively and certifies that LinkScan 12.0 operates with the Microsoft Vista operating system. It is the most accurate, fastest and most scalable product available and it is highly customizable. It also does HTML validation. LinkScan creates two types of publication quality SiteMaps and it is professionally supported. LinkScan requires Perl 5. Reports may be viewed using all industry standard browsers and it has a graphical user interface (GUI) for Windows systems.

LinkScan is offered as five products:

We provide a detailed list of LinkScan Features and Benefits.

For the first time, organizations can use totally compatible solutions on their central web and intranet servers, and individual user/developer workstations. The combination of Server, Workstation and Enterprise products, new aggressive volume discounts, and reduced training and maintenance adds up to improved management control and significant cost savings.

LinkScan checks websites through the file system and/or HTTP. Both processes are necessary. The file system process is ten times faster than the server process and it enables LinkScan to identify orphan files. Checking links through the web server enables LinkScan to check active elements such as CGI's, image maps, external links and Server Side Includes. Having both capabilities also enables the user to mirror their production server on either their workstation and/or a development server.

Unix users do not need to know Unix to run it. It sets up all directories and permissions and builds the configuation file automatically. Windows users will be pleased to find that the executive file automatically installs LinkScan on their computers. Most users have it running in minutes.

LinkScan's Interactive Report Generator is capable of producing dozens of different reports to a users specifications with a few clicks of the mouse in your browser. The following examples show a few of the more important reports.

You can check your entire website today by downloading a free evaluation copy of LinkScan at:

http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/dleval.cgi

The message we are sending to webmasters is: "Don't get caught with your links down. Don't let your visitors think your site sucks! Fix those broken links today."

Site Mapping

LinkScan produces two revolutionary types of maps of web sites.

LinkScan's SiteMap enables the user to produce a site map that includes every link on a website arranged in a hierarchical format that resembles a book's table of contents. A LinkScan SiteMap greatly assist users in navigating their way around a large and/or complex website. It is also an excellent tool for webmasters to review the overall site design and structure and reveals missing, inadequate or inaccurate page titles. We recommend that you view the SiteMap for our Elsop site at this URL:

http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/map.html

LinkScan's TapMap is an expandable and collapsible site map that allows viewers to drill down through the various and multiple levels of a website to quickly and easily navigate and explore the website by tapping on a few control icons. The TapMap is especially useful for sites with over 400 pages. Users can provide single side include (SSI) links on all of their pages to the TapMap which when invoked bring up the TapMap with the current page central on the map. You can test drive our interactive TapMap. Be sure to try zooming in and out with the and icons. Try our live TapMap Demo

Both the SiteMap and the Tapmap have customization features so that users can more easily and quickly create publication quality road maps of their sites. Elsop has incorporated a Target option to simplify the creation of SiteMaps and TapMaps in Frames.

A very comprehensive and detailed description of LinkScan's features and benefits is on thie page:

http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/overview.html

Market Information

The total market for link validating and site mapping is enormous. There are millions of websites on the WWW and on private intranets. Elsop has elected to target a small subset of that market. In early 1996, we recognized that of the many link checking products on the market, none of them could handle very large websites. We tested every product available and found that most of them simply did not check the status of links correctly regardless of the size of the website. When we attempted to test these products on a large website (one with 400 pages and 5,000 external links), we found that none of the products could complete processing of the site. All of the products blew up somewhere about midway through the site. Furthermore, we found that all of these products took a huge amount of time in their attempt to complete the task. The best products blew up at around 2,500 links and took over fourteen (14) hours to reach that point.

We decided we found a problem that needed to be fixed. We anticipated not only a huge proliferation of websites, but also that many of them would rapidly grow to a size where they would need a solution for checking their links and creating maps on their sites that the current products could not do. We commenced building the solution: LinkScan. After more than a year of development, We released LinkScan 1.0 on January 22, 1997. Since then, there have been many upgrade releases and we are up to version 12.1. Press announcements on each release may be found at:

http://www.elsop.com/new.html

Elsop's Customers

Elsop's target market includes corporation with over 100 employees, government agencies, and universities with more than 5,000 students. Elsop has some small organizations as customers such as high schools and website designers, but most of its customers are very large organizations. LinkScan is used in many countries throughout the world. Current customers are located in:

We maintain a representative list of our customers online at:

http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/clients.html

LinkScan has received many accolades from customers and prospects. We have put a small sample ot these on our site for your review at:

http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/kudos.html

LinkScan Pricing and Ordering Information

Volume discounts are shown at this URL:

http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/purchase.html#volume

Orders may be placed online via a secure server. Visa, MasterCard, and American Express cards are accepted in addition to payment by check or money order.

New orders and orders for upgrades may be place at this URL:

http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/order.cgi

Buyers who need to prepare Check Requisitions should read the Guidelines on this page:

http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/purchase.html

Customer Support and Documentation

Elsop provides free unlimited support to its customers. In addition to the personal attention we provide to every LinkScan user, we also provide documentation in a hypertext document that is fully searchable, and another single document printable version. In addition to the documentation search, we also provide a search feature for our entire site.

Our Startup Guide for Unix is brief and to the point. The Startup Guide for Windows is also brief. Both Startup Guides supplement the self-install features of the products. We also maintain a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page and a Bug Status Report that is supplemented with a Revision History. We encourage users to submit bug reports and customers can update their license keys at any time. Officially, we are available to assist customers from 8 AM to 8 PM Pacific Time seven days a week. Unofficially, we work long and wacky hours so you are likely to find us responsive at just about any time.

Competition

There is a great deal of shareware and freeware available that does an adequate job for the small website. That software is mostly unsupported, undocumented, and not being maintained or enhanced. As the saying goes, "You get what you pay for."

There are also a fairly large number of commercial products on the market that perform similar functions to LinkScan. Some of these are offered by major corporations such as Microsoft and Netscape. We do not feel that these products serve the market we are addressing.

Distribution

LinkScan is sold exclusively by ourselves through our website. We don't use distributors, VARs or retailers. Since LinkScan can only be purchased from Elsop, the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) and the street price are the same.

Marketing

Elsop markets and promotes its products entirely over the internet. Our primary means of attracting new customers is through the placement of advertising banners on popular websites. All of these websites have been developed and are owned by the company or its principals. These websites receive approximately 1,000,000 hits per month that results in approximately 75,000 visitors a month to our websites.

About the Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop)

Development of LinkScan commenced in early 1996. After the original version was developed, the founders released it on January 6, 1997, through their newly founded privately-held Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop) which is based in San Jose, California. Elsop's mission is to provide the most advanced high-quality software for quality assurance and management of internet/intranet websites. Electronic Software Publishing Corporation is a distributor of software products over the world wide web via Electronic Software Distribution. Elsop will be offering software products developed by other independent third party software developers. Elsop provides free demonstration software, secure order taking, and fulfillment of software orders automatically entirely on the world wide web.

The Electronic Software Publishing Corporation is registered as a Nevada corporation.

The corporation is also Registered to do business in California, which is where our corporate office is located.

A tour would not be complete without a visit to our Home Page

http://www.elsop.com/

Company Philosophy

Elsop is a customer driven company. That means we listen to our customers and our prospects. Our customers are our directors. They speak and we respond. They say jump and we ask "how high". Our customer's input drives our product development. We offer free and unlimited technical and customer support to all that request it. We believe that we learn from this activity what our customers need from us in both product and company policy and practices. We appreciate our customer's business because that is the only reason we are in business. We also strive to be profitable because that ensures we will be there when we are needed by our customers.

About the Founders and Principals of Elsop

The company was founded by Malcolm C.P. Hoar and the late Kenneth R. Churilla. Both founders have over 25 years of experience in the computer industry with strong backgrounds in technical and marketing management. For more about the principals' backgrounds, you may review our officers' resumes.

Contact Information

Corporate Headquarters

Electronic Software Publishing Corporation
43793 Cameron Hills Drive
Fremont, CA 94539
U.S.A.
[email protected]


LinkScan: Finds Broken Links and Creates SiteMaps

Try a Free Evaluation Copy of our Product: LinkScan

LinkScan is a website quality assurance tool that checks links and produces two types of SiteMaps using multi-threaded simultaneous processing that provides reports on HTML pages readable from any browser on any platform. It is capable of checking as many as 40,000 links per hour. Download a free evaluation copy now.