In my day job, my company has about 5 main competitors and dozens of other companies making similar products.

It's nice to know who's been updating their website and saying what, but I just don't have time to check everyone.

I discovered http://www.changedetection.com/

Its a free service, you enter a URL to monitor and and email address to send an alert to.

They spider the designated site, compared the contents to last time they looked and send you a mail if anything changes.

This way my company's competitors tell me when they change their site.

You can also make your website tell your customers when it has changed, there's a widget for webmasters.

If as a designer, you don't need this, it'd be a nice freebie to tell your customers about so they can monitor ~their~ competitors.

I'm not connected in any way to this service.

Enjoy!