Real World Website Evaluation. How Does Your Website Rank ?

Image by gorgeoux @ Flickr

You have been handed the keys to your brand spankin’ website which you hope will be the answer to your online business woes.  But how does your website really stack up when it is analysed and scrutinised with a fine tooth comb?  Let me help you understand the finer points of what really makes a website stand out from the crowd.

When it comes to analysing and evaluating websites, it makes perfect sense to follow a set of standard criteria.  With my own website evaluation business, I came up with a set of criteria that I use to measure website capabilities:

• Aesthetics
• Navigation
• Communication
• User Experience
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Page Metrics

Aesthetics

Aesthetics consists of the use of fonts, colour, images and media such as sound, flash and video.  It’s the look and feel, the emotional effect and the silent communicator.  It’s important to get your aesthetics right because it gives your users an insight into the levels of professionalism, credibility and trust that your business website is displaying.

Aesthetically poor websites are usually a legacy of the sceptical business owner who didn’t want to spend thousands on a professional design so opted to do it themselves, resulting in a website that is more inclined to cost business and damage reputations.  You don’t have to spend a fortune on professional design to achieve great aesthetics.  A Google search for website templates will present you with many websites selling great looking and affordable website templates, one of the most popular being DreamTemplate.

Important things to look for when evaluating your website aesthetics:

• Consistent use of fonts (style and size) for titles and text.
• Colour contrast – if you have trouble reading text due to the colours being used then change the colours.  A good website will generally use no more than five base colours with variations in tone for effect.
• Don’t add images just for the sake of it or to take up space.  Make sure your images are relevant to the content.
• Sound – background music that starts up when a website loads can sometimes scare the user (the web is still mostly a silent medium) and it can affect page load speeds so best to use wisely, if not at all.
• Flash – when used for interactive purposes is a great asset to have on your website but when used for banner advertising it can be very annoying and they don’t attract the click rates to justify their use.
• Video – make sure video is playing at the user request i.e. don’t set it to play automatically on page load.

Navigation

I’m very much a believer that navigation is the most important part of any website.  The information you want to make available will determine the structure of your navigation system and this in turn will determine the website design.  Information controls the design, not the other way around.

A website with poor navigation will have the user scurrying back to the next item in their search result list (your competitor).  The user is looking for information and they want it now, if  they can’t find it then they don’t care how great your website looks, they simply leave and continue their search elsewhere.

Important things to look for when evaluating your website navigation:

• Global or Primary navigation must be the same on every page of your website.
• Local or Secondary navigation, although the items in the navigation will change, the navigation should be in the same spot on the page.
• Use a Search box only when required and only on medium to large websites.  Search is not necessary on small websites (less than 50 pages).
• Do you have a Sitemap?  Sitemaps have become almost standard and are a great fallback for your users so make sure you have one.

Communication

Website communication is all about getting your message across.  Making proper use of language, grammar, spelling, context, labels, titles and headings is key to effective communication.  Communication, like website aesthetics (which communicates visually), will indicate the level of professionalism, credibility and trust.

All I can say about bad website communication is that when it’s staring you right in the face, you tend not to stick around for very long.  And you do know when it’s there, almost instinctively.  Questions start entering your head along the lines of What the hell does this business actually do? or What are they trying to sell? If those questions are entering your customer’s heads when they look at your website then it’s time to fix your message and start communicating effectively.

Important things to look for when evaluating your website communication:

• Does your home page clearly state exactly what you do?
• Spelling and grammatical errors – at the very least you should put your website through a spelling and grammar check.
• Make sure your page titles (the text at the top of your browser) and headings are related and in context.
• Clearly stating the benefits of your service / product.
• Content scanning – make sure your content is easily scanned and doesn’t read like a book.  Break content up for easy reading by using headings and lists.
• Legal Disclaimers, Privacy Policies and Terms Of Service can be used to increase credibility.

User Experience

Creating an enjoyable user experience on your website is not all that easy to achieve no matter how much planning goes into it.  The key to creating a pleasant user experience lies in identifying points of interaction, usually forms, and making sure the potential for frustration is eliminated.  Delivering expected behavior to the user and providing help when they need it will give them a great sense of confidence and that gives your trust and credibility a much needed boost.

A website that provides a bad user experience really does expose itself for never being visited again.  Users may be forgiving with poor aesthetics or communication but they are brutal when they have a bad experience.  When they can’t complete a straightforward task whilst interacting with your website then they are unlikely to return and they will want to tell anybody prepared to listen.

Important things to look for when evaluating your website user experience:

• Web forms are clearly labelled.  Input criteria and limitations are obvious e.g. Required fields, Username and Password character limits.
• Expected behavior occurs after form submission e.g. a success or error page is displayed.
• Login forms are only displayed on pages using SSL (https).
• Help systems are obviously labelled and available when needed.
• Accessibility guidelines are being adhered to.
• Test your website in many of the popular browsers to find and fix compatibility issues.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The purpose of SEO is to boost the exposure and ranking of your website in search engine results.  Applying SEO techniques to your website involves using keywords in page titles, headings, link text, URL’s, meta tags and of course in the content itself.  This is only the basics of SEO, there is a lot more to it than just keywords.  When I perform a website evaluation I restrict myself to the internals of the website and try not to look too much into external factors such as search engine rankings, inbound links etc.

For business websites, SEO is very important, especially if you are in a highly competitive field.  You only need to perform a Google search for your target keywords to see how you and your competition are performing.  For highly competitive keywords it’s clear to see that SEO is behind the success of business websites ranking in the top three search results.  For less competitive keywords you may rank high just for merely mentioning the keyword somewhere in your content but that doesn’t mean you should ignore SEO altogether.

Important things to look for when evaluating your website SEO:

• Title tag is present and unique on each page and contains your targeted keywords.
• Heading tags (h1, h2, h3 etc.) are used to build page structure and contain keywords.
• Meta tags for description and keywords is present and unique on each page.  The keywords meta tag is considered optional, the major search engines don’t process this data anymore but it may still be used by lesser known search engines or directories.

Page Metrics

Page metrics refers to the speed and responsiveness of your website.  Page metrics covers object counts, loading times, file sizes, compression, file streaming and caching.  Page metrics are very technical and an evaluation of them is designed to give recommendations to improve your site speed by reducing the number of HTTP requests per page, reducing object counts and file sizes and taking advantage of browser caching.  Page metrics is really when the less is better analogy comes to the fore.

I’m sure all of us have experienced a slow loading website;  it’s frustrating because we don’t want to have to wait too long for the information we’re after.  The facts are that on 56Kbps dial-up internet connections, users are willing to wait at least 20 seconds for the page to load.  It’s a different story on broadband internet where users on 1.5Mbps connections expect the page to load in no more than 4 seconds.  So in the battle of a great new website that loads painfully slow vs. a less attractive website that loads super fast, the winner will almost always be the faster loading website.  You don’t want to lose potential customers by ignoring this important aspect of website optimisation.

Important things to look for when evaluating your website page metrics:

• Measure your page load times.  This is easily done using a browser plugin such as Firebug for Firefox.
• Check your file sizes, in particular image and media files.  Compress them as much as possible without losing quality.
• If possible, combine and compress your CSS and Javascript files.  This may not always be possible with some content management systems.

To Conclude

Having used the above criteria to self evaluate your website, how does your website stack up now?

Hopefully your website designer is aware of all of the above criteria and recognises the importance that each plays in driving website success.  If not, then don’t be afraid to bring your website issues to the attention of your web designer.  If so, then you should be very happy and confident that your website will rise to stand out from the crowd.