Introducing Errorlytics

In keeping with the spirit of our last posting, where I ate humble pie regarding the launch of our new corporate website, now it’s time to share another recent experience we’re going through around here: launching our first web app.

The Back-story

When we started managing our client’s websites several years back, as a matter of best practice we started to analyze website errors, with an eye of course towards eliminating them.  The most prevalent culprit of the many web errors was not surprisingly the 404 or "Page Not Found" error.  In order to track 404s (especially after we re-launched a client site), we would install some basic PHP code on our 404 pages that gathered a bunch of info about why the error was triggered and who triggered it. This gave us the intelligence we needed to go out and fix the problem. All this info for each and every 404 was emailed to...ME.

The Idea

After my 2,374th error email in a single day one random day I said to myself "there’s got to be a better way!"  While the data we got on the errors was great for fixing problems we would have otherwise not known about, the email was overwhelming. I created rules in Outlook to put them all in their own folders - but then I was ignoring the errors again!

What if we built an application that not only kept you informed about the 404s on your site, but did so in an easily digestible daily email, or an RSS feed?  Then, what if that same tool allowed you to fix the error, right there in the app itself!  No FTPing into the site to muck around with regex on the .htaccess file.  Just click a link, write a plain-English rule that says "if they are looking for page XYZ, please 301 redirect them to ABC instead."

Errorlytics

That is pretty much how the idea for our first web app - Errorlytics - came about.  It took waaaay longer to get to market than I had dreamed, and of course it cost more to get to market than I had hoped.  But here we are.  Now the real fun begins!  Communicating with our market, gathering user feedback, and revising the product to make it more about what THEY want than what I want.

If you have the time, please do us a favor and check out the app and let it help you fix 404 errors - install it on your site(s) and let us know what you think.  Check out the Errorlytics blog for more info on recent changes to the tool, explanations of what you can do with it and why we think it can help you in your day to day management of your internet marketing programs.