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How to Evaluate Your Website
How to Evaluate Your Website
As a good website owner, there are certain questions and considerations you should ask yourself when looking over your website. There’s more to running a website than adding content and sitting back to wait for a profit. The following questions are all answerable with either a “Yes” or a “No”, and the more “yes” answers that you come up with for your website, the happier you should be with your online presence.
The fact is that all websites have design or content flaws, usually because of a website owner’s limited resources or certain factors that a website owner has to give up on in order to meet their budget or time requirements. Answering these questions can help you figure out what areas of your website need the most attention right away. The 25 questions listed here are a sort of questionnaire that can jumpstart you into action. Maybe your “to do” list for your website is so long that you’re missing out on basic solutions that need to be reached right now.
Security
Security concerns are a big part of evaluating your website’s functionality. If your website has a security flaw, you could be in danger of releasing customer data or your personal business information to people you’d rather not share it with.
1. Are there any obvious security flaws on your website? Is everything properly encrypted to avoid glaring security errors?
2. How well can your website’s input forms handle special characters? User input must be properly stripped of special characters in order to avoid scripting problems caused by the way that operating systems read them.
3. Do your private directories use password protection? Using password protection via .htaccess (also known as hypertext access) is an easy way to thwart many basic invasion attempts.
4. Are your public non document directories such as cgi-bin and images indexable? To block access to your site, you need to set up proper permission settings.
5. If you are storing any customer data online, are your info databses protected against external access?
Content
Too often overlooked by website owners, content should be the whole point of your website. If you don’t have anything unique to say (or writers who have unique things to say for you) you’d be better off in another business. Outside of the quality of content, here are five questions to ask yourself about how that content is presented.
1. Do you regularly update your website’s content? Building a website once and letting it run its course is simply not a successful model. Updating “regularly” doesn’t have to mean every day, but not updating at all is a sure way to fail online.
2. Is your content broken up into bite size pieces? Good web content has a few certain features — small chunks of content broken up with highlighting like headings and sub-headings helps people “skim” through your content to find what they want.
3. Are you placing links in your website’s articles? You should have plenty of links to definitions of terminology or broader subject as well as links to affiliated pages.
4. A matter of fairness to your content writers — do you have an “about page” to identify the original author or credit a course for your content that you didn’t write?
5. If the contrast between the text of your content and the website’s background color is bad, your website will be hard on customer’s eyes. Does your content color work well with your background color?
Design
We’ve all seen awful websites. Think back to the days when everyone had a Geocities account with millions of flashing stars, animations, and annoying midi tunes.
1. Is your website’s design aesthetically appealing? This is a general question about your website as a whole. Does it look good? Would you shop on your own website?
2. When it comes to color, there are two keys to website design. Are the colors you use harmonious with each other? Do the colors have a logical relation? Compatible colors are easy to look up and can instantly transform a website from ugly to classy.
3. Remember to consider people with visual problems — do the color choices you’ve made on your website make themselves easy to read for the colorblind or visually impaired? Colors should be high enough in contrast with each other to be easily legible by people of all sight abilities.
4. The fonts you use on your website should be as easily legible as those in a magazine or newspaper. When website designers talk about “degrading” of fonts, they mean that your fonts should look basically the same in various screen resolutions. Have you tested your content’s font at different resolutions? Also be sure that your standard text size is legible for those customers who may not know how to adjust their browsers font size.
5. Is your website’s design appropriate for your audience? If your content is about e-cigarettes and the design looks like something out of Hannah Montana, you’re doing it wrong.
Navigation
1. Does your website’s navigation also provide a text-based alternative for people who aren’t Java or Flash enabled?
2. How fast do your clicks get a response? If there’s no response given immediately (within 0.1 seconds after a click) then you are facing a problem.
3. If you have a clickable link, is it obviously clickable? Use style points to indicate that a link exists.
4. You’ve heard the term “intuitive navigation” — is it easy to navigate your website without any instruction?
5. Do you provide an obvious site map for your website? Alternatives include a keyword-based search feature, though this may not be necessary until your website hits thousands of pages.
Accessibility
1. Is your website’s content separate from your navigational features?
2. Does your website work on different browsers?
3. Is your website compatible with different coding standards such as CSS or Valid HTML?
4. When you post an image to your website that is important, do you place ‘alt’ tags?
5. Essential information on your website should be available in a text format, not just in images or multimedia files. Are you doing that?
Your website’s effectiveness depends exclusively on the way you operate it. Owning a website is the opposite of a “turn key” operation, requiring time and thoughtfulness to turn space on the Internet into cash. By asking yourself the above 25 questions, you should get a better idea of your website’s ability to earn money.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 5:40 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.