1. What is MonitorWiz?
MonitorWiz is an application for tracking web page changes.
The main focus and strength of MonitorWiz is accurate web page change detection. You can pinpoint specific page areas to monitor, big or small. MonitorWiz will make sure no change goes undetected.
Big page updates like blogs posts, reviews and articles or small changes like product prices, item availability and review scores – pick you target and let MonitorWiz instantly notify you when the change happens.
2. How does MonitorWiz work?
Modern day web pages are full of dynamic content: news feeds, ads, flashy graphics and more. In most cases people care about certain information found on a web page. MonitorWiz allows you to pinpoint and track things you care about.
Tracking pages with images or treating them as one big lump of text are not precise enough and produce too many false detections.
MonitorWiz for that reason observes the core ingredients of every web page – HTML elements.
The best way to monitor changing HTML pages is to use CSS Selectors.
3. What are CSS Selectors?
CSS Selectors are short text commands that are used by web browser to locate parts of the page and put some pretty formatting to the page text – different fonts, colors, backgrounds and more.
MonitorWiz uses CSS Selectors to let you select specific parts of web page you care about. MonitorWiz will observe those selected areas and notify you when changes occur.
4. How to setup CSS Selectors for my monitored page?
CSS Selectors will be specific to the website page you are planning to observe. Browser like Chrome and Firefox comes with tools that let you inspect the website layout.
You can click on web page sections you care about and get CSS Selectors to select them.
Check out a short tutorial on how to find CSS Selectors in Chrome and Firefox.
5. Can I monitor full web page without using CSS Selectors?
Full page monitoring without CSS selectors is possible but in most cases not recommended.
Today’s websites use a lot of dynamic content, animations and changing graphics. This will trigger MonitorWiz to detect changes.
Don’t forget that every web page uses HTML elements and CSS Selectors should always be your preferred option. And good luck finding fully static pages these days. 😉
6. Can MonitorWiz be used to monitor when website is down?
Yes, if website can’t be found, you will be notified.
7. Can I set up more than one email for change notifications?
All paid subscription plans support multiple (up to 5) notification emails.
8. Can MonitorWiz detect changed images?
Yes, if the image name changes.
It is a well established practice by web designers to always change image name when image is modified. This is done to avoid confusing web browsers that might fail to reload changed images.
MonitorWiz works by following the same principle – you should use CSS Selectors to target image html tags and image names. If image name changes, you will be notified about page change.
9. Can I trigger a check of all websites in my list manually?
MonitorWiz has Check All option on control panel that allows for immediate check of all listed websites. This is useful if you need to periodically check multiple websites for any possible changes.