Website appraisal and testing
Following our definition of website architecture, there are 4 main categories of website appraisal.
- Aesthetics ('Delight'): are the graphics pleasing? are they appropriate to the target audience? what do the colours symbolise (viz the American political websites' use of the colours of the US flag)?
- Technical quality ('Firmness'): browser compatibility? Bobby compatibility? Navigation and information architecture? Use of tables/frames? Response speed (re dynamic sites and dial-up)? Keyword strategy re SEO/SEM (URL, title, filenames, CSS etc)? Keyword density on homepage? Is there a link exchange strategy?
- Usefulness ('Commodity'): does the website provide visitors with the types of feature they are likely to want? Site map? Site search? Contact deails? A sense of belonging to a community? Does the site 'give away something useful and charge for something else'? Is it 'just a brochure site'?
- Business: does the site serve the objectives of the provider? How is the site funded? Have the site owners thought about more than one revenue stream? Does it look as though the site makes a valuable contribution to the business - or does it exist just because 'everyone has a website'?
But who should assess a website?
- The designer?
- Other web designers?
- Clients?
- Users?
- Accountants?
The short answer is: all of them. Website providers must be aware of the views of others. This requires systematic website appraisal and testing, raising issues of sample selection, sample size, methodology, interview techniques and questionnaires. Some examples are given below.
- Response Time Assessment: measure response times times for key and representative pages using a range of computers, monitors, browsers and internet connections.
- Functional Assessment: plan and execute a structured test using a sample of users - and analyse the results.
- Aesthetic Assessment: this can be done using the techniques developed by landscape architects for social-survey based scenic quality assessment. It involves showing webpages to representative users and asking them to give scores for aesthetic quality.
- Technical Assessment: try and discover what software was used to create the website; find out if the site is compatible with different versions of different browsers
- Link Popularity Assessment: In Google, the command link:www.gre.ac.uk will give a figure for the number of incoming links to the University of Greenwich website.
- Accessibility Assessment: Accessibility of web content to blind and visually impaired viewers can be tested. See Bobby and the WC3 Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
- Information Architecture: conduct systematic tests, with a 1:1 observer:tester ratio, to map and measure information retrieval operations.