Introducing Our Web Site Assistant - Software with a Service
by Dave GI started Our Web Site Assistant as a "scratch your own itch" solution for helping to ensure a creative design agency's customer WordPress website was kept fully cached.
Before starting on code I saw there was one other direct competitor out there, which validated the idea that there may be customer need to some level - if the site owners know it's a problem.
By crawling their site it meant all pages were loaded, ready for real visitors. I then wondered if I was loading the full page HTML then doing nothing with it was a bit of a waste and could my crawler add extra value....
That then spun off into checking for broken links / images, scripts and style sheets. Result logs are then emailed after a crawl to the contact.
The wider feature set now overlaps with a few other established tools, however they are offered as a SaaS where the marketing person would then need to set it up and understand and implement the results.
After working closely with the agency and their customer, who was a senior marketing team manager, they needed a Service to tell them how to fix the issue, not just what is wrong.
And so this is how Our Web Site Assistant was started. A custom Software with a Service included for those in need. This will hopefully help to productise it in the future.
