Website Design Analysis
What Is a Website Design Analysis?
We examine and evaluate a number of aspects of your website and report on our findings. We provide several different levels of detail from a website SpotScan up to a comprehensive SiteScan depending on your needs. We include an Executive Overview on larger reports which includes summary data without all the nasty details.
You receive a report that describes each of the following areas and our findings. We include recommendations as to how to improve each area. The result is a complete evaluation of your site that you can give to your web developer (or us) as a road map to improving your site.
Specific areas we evaluate include:
Browser Compatibility
We load your pages into a number of the most popular browsers and evaluate how consistent they appear/work across the set.
Many sites look great in a single browser and even advertise that fact ("Looks best in..."). We believe this is the wrong way to design websites. The people who use the Internet (your potential customers) are a diverse group who use a variety of browsers. It makes little sense to alienate those users by making the site inaccessable to them. For example, consider a company that produces software for Windows. Even users coming to the site using Macintosh or Linux browsers are potential customers since they may use more than one platform. Making your site available increases your potential customer base.
Design Flaws
We evaluate your visual design including font use, consistency, integrity, accessability, search engine scanability, page structure, and content placement.
Use of multiple fonts on a single page has been included in lists of bad ideas for design for years, yet the practice continues. Design principles, while somewhat subjective, do have some reasonable standards. One of the rules learned many years ago was referred to as The Law of Least Astonishment. Simply put, surprises are not a good thing. We look at the big picture and see how elements work with or against one another.
Navigation Problems
We evaluate the effectiveness of your navigational controls.
Navigation should not change greatly from page to page. The user should know where they are and how to get to where they want to go (and how to get back).
Site Structure
We evaluate your site's structure for elements including broken links, categorizational problems, and site integrity.
A site with broken links loses customers. The inability to find content due to a poorly organized site loses customers. A site that seems to send customers "into the weeds" loses customers. These are bad things.
Graphics Analysis
We evaluate the site's use of graphics and it's relevance to the page's purposes. We also evaluate quality, placement, and format.
Overuse of graphics for decoration is a common problem. Graphics should support the function of the page. Formats should not be browser specific.
Meeting the Goals
We evaluate how well each page meets the goals you've specified.
Websites are often built because "every company needs a website," without considering what the site does for the business. A website is there to serve a function. But how well does it do that?
Maintainability
We score the site for it's ability to be changed, redesigned, and kept current.
A site must change to stay current. An overly complex or poorly constructed site is far more difficult to update than one that has been designed for change. We include recommendations as to how to improve the maintainability of the site. Consider a Standards-Based website design using xHTML/CSS as a basis for any redesign.
Language Use
We evaluate the language used and how well it fits the target audience.
Standards Compliance
We report on how well each page conforms to the established standards for HTML as defined by the W3C.
A summary is provided indicating what the major nonconforming elements are. We include recommendations on how to improve compliance.