|
|
|||
|
About
Products
Free Trial
Purchase
Support
Tech Library
Neat Stuff
Privacy |
Search SiteMap Contact | ||
Elsop's Company TourWelcome 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. Ken Churilla, President LinkScan is a Hot Product - Product OverviewPeople 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. LinkValidationLinkScan 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 MappingLinkScan 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
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 InformationThe 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 11.0. Press announcements on each release may be found at: The internet is growing at an incredible rate and we feel we will grow right along with it. There is an excellent set of graphs and tables that show this growth on the Hobbes' Internet Timeline page. Another very useful view of the growth and size of the is shown in the Netcraft Web Server Survey which is based on over two and a half million installations. How big is the world wide web? Current estimates are that there are upwards of over one billion pages on the WWW. There were, at a minimum, 275 million pages on the web as of March, 1998, according to one study. Up to more than 5% of the links indexed by the major search engines are invalid according to a recent study. The dead links problem has increased over 50% in less than a year according to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for June 14, 1998 in an article titled: Fighting Linkrot. See article at the following URL. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980614.html Elsop's CustomersElsop'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 DocumentationElsop 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. CompetitionThere 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. We publish a list on our website of over 100 products that perform similar functions at this URL: http://www.elsop.com/wrc/comp_ls.htm But we do not consider these companies to be competitors which is why we aren't afraid to publicise who they are. We have tested all of these products and have determined that none of them would work in our typical customer's environment. In sum, LinkScan currently has no competition in its chosen market. DistributionLinkScan 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. MarketingElsop 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. Some of the websites which the company or its principals own and on which we advertise include the following: Elsop Webmaster Resource Center Humor for Webmasters NewsXpress FAQ Version 2 Guide to Data Communications FAQ Silicon Valley Web Directory Eureka! Internet Search Engine GoCee.com Poker Center Elsop also provides special interest websites about Electronic Commerce, Intranets, Website Development, Anti-Spam Information, Unix, Computer Publications on the web, and Internet History. Elsop does regular mailings via e-mail to over 1,000 editors and reporters at approximately 600 computer industry trade publications. Regular postings to relevant newsgroups of product releases are also performed. A significant amount of traffic to our website is also generated by good placement in all the major search engines and by a very large number of links to our website from other sites. 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. To view our registration information with the Secretary of State of Nevada click the following button: 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 Company PhilosophyElsop 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 ElsopThe company was founded by Malcolm C.P. (Malch) Hoar, Chairman of the Board, and Kenneth R. (Ken) Churilla, President. 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. Ken Churilla Malcolm Hoar Contact InformationFor press, marketing or business issues, contact: Kenneth R. (Ken) Churilla For technical issues, contact: Malcolm C. (Malch) Hoar Corporate Headquarters Electronic Software Publishing Corporation For other matters, use e-mail to contact us.
Try a Free Evaluation Copy of our Product: LinkScanLinkScan 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. |
| © Copyright 1997-2008
Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop) LinkScan™ and Elsop™ are Trademarks of Electronic Software Publishing Corporation |
and
icons. You must login with Username: demo and Password: demo to
try our live 