Very often the biggest hurdle in making the plunge into creating an effective web presence is the evaluation of how important it truly is. Many people view a website as a brochure center to let people gather contact information and explain services. It's much much more than that.Even industries still not fully adopted to the web will eventually see they're methods of connection for future and existing clients migrate this way. This is a good thing! The web provides strong statistical tracking in which you can manage campaign effectiveness and by using your website as the focal point for more traditional marketing efforts such as print, tv, and radio your able to get a better understanding of how well those campaigns really did.

To better understand the power of your web presence I've decided to provide some links to online tools that can give you a better understanding of where your web presence stands today. Regardless of the information reported you'll know what the next steps are and how important this migration to the web truly is.

Even if you've already made the investment it will tell you things about your website that should you know. Is the person or firm I had develop my website a true professional? Is it to the expectations I expect? Check these tools out and get a better understanding.

Website: http://www.websitegrader.com

Purpose: To Provide a General Score for Website Effectiveness

Tool Grade from Unleashed Technologies: 75 out of 100

More Information: Website Grader is a great tool for getting a baseline on the technical aspects of your website and it's current effectiveness based on those criteria. It also has some basic SEO considerations such as external linking, meta information, social media, and blogs giving you an accurate depiction of your website. We've found that this can have a 20% swing in any direction as it's truly just a very quick snapshot of what it finds after spidering your site and pulling from online sources such as Google for extended information. This can be a real eye opener for the business owner whether you're ranked high and not getting the submissions you'd expect or you've got a very poor rating and you we're under a completely different impression.

Website: http://www.google.com/analytics

Purpose: To Provide ACCURATE Web Statistics

Tool Grade from Unleashed Technologies: 99 out of 100

More Information: Why 99 and not 100? If you give out perfect scores they won't keep trying harder.. at least that's what I say! This is the most cost effective tool for tracking real in-depth information about your website. The price is... free and very few people require a localized version of Google Analytics (commonly known as Urchin). Many people out there are using statistic tracking tools that are provided with there hosting. I can't say enough negative things to discourage this practice. Most of these deployments are made to count everything in a positive light even when that's not the case. Numbers will be inflated giving you a false sense of success in generating traffic for your web presence. This is a very common practice amongst large hosting companies and web firms that want to keep you happy committing to promises they can't deliver on.

Installing Google Analytics is easy and even if you don't have anyone technically sound enough to do it on staff contacting a web firm to help you out should result in very low cost impact.

COMPETE.COM (Can't get their logo easy so no cool graphic!)

Website: http://www.compete.com

Purpose: To Provide Traffic and Demographic Information

Tool Grade from Unleashed Technologies: 85 out of 100

More Information: This is a terrific tool assuming that you're ranked and allows you to see how you stack up against your competitors in traffic amongst many other areas as well. The tool has many paid for options so using it for free will yield interesting but maybe not the most detailed information you'd like to get your hands on. If you're willing to spend a little cash you'll find it may be well worth the investment. Especially if you've decided to make the web a major competing point against those that would.... compete!

Hopefully you'll take a moment, have some fun and learn more about the websites that affect your business. All of these are free and Website Grader and Compete.com are very quick returns as you just enter your URL and get results back. For Analytics you'll have to install the page script but remember there is nothing more important than collecting statistical information that helps you make informed decisions about moving forward.