Chances are you’ve checked out your competition’s websites a time or two. It’s a good idea to do this every now and then. After all, if you don’t occasionally “fraternize with the enemy,” how will you know when they start plotting against you? Perhaps you want to know how often a competitor rotates their featured products, or you would like to know when they post a new article, link or other resource. But . . . it’s time-consuming to manually visit each website you want to keep tabs on, and haven’t you already got enough to do?
Enter website monitoring software. ChangeDetection.com monitors changes in text to a webpage, and it’s totally free. All you have to do is enter in the URL and your email, and ChangeDetection takes over, checking the requested webpage about once a day. This service does not monitor text from external files or text retrieved by JavaScript. It’s not always easy to tell when a webpage has changed, but this service notices any change to any text, which could include changing the date or ads being displayed on the page. ChangeDetection does not monitor changes to images or to the HTML code of a webpage, but guess what? SourceForge.com does.
Another option is WebSite-Watcher, which allows you to check an unlimited number of web sites for changes. This service lets you filter such things as banner ads, so you won’t receive notification every time they run a new ad, unless you want to. WebSite-Watcher saves the last two versions of websites to your harddisk and highlights all changes to the text, to make them easy to spot. You guessed it, this increased functionality comes with a price tag, but it’s pretty reasonable. If, after the free trial, you are hooked, it’s $29.95 to download.
Your competitors have nothing on you now!
