Web Site Review
How can you be sure that your web site designer is doing a good job for you? Sure, the site may look good, but is it optimised for search engines, different browsers, and does it portray the image you think it does?
I’ve recently been asked to look at a couple of small business’ new web sites. Typically the owner thinks it’s great but just wants someone like me with a larger-scale IT background to “check it out and tell me what you think”.
In one case the site was created by an student doing an IT degree, in others by small, local independent web designers or small companies.
In every case the site was inadequate for the purpose intended. Read more on my blog...
A Sample Web Site Review
The report below was delivered to a company in South East England who had spent thousands of pounds with a web developer who had delivered a draft site entirely written in Dreamweaver. This was an urgent project to support the launch of a new sister company to target a new market segment with a new domain name. Our report was delivered within 48 hours of the original request.
All names, company details and screen shots have been removed and the text formatted for online presentation.
Web Site Review for the yourcompany.com site
Colours and images
Page Background
The images and DIV backgrounds are white, however this does not extend to all page elements. For visitors who have a non-default application background colour the page is therefore not uniformly coloured:
Button ribbon and links
- All buttons are the same size. As they are laid out on a button ribbon with a single background colour his means that the text is unevenly spaced.
- While the hover highlight colour matches the text colour in the banner and address images, the link colour (e.g. the "interview coaching " link in the title bar) does not match.
- When links in the button ribbon are clicked, a faint blue border is evident which spoils the appearance of the bar. This occurs in Firefox and IE.
- The links at the bottom of the home page appear to be using browser default settings. These should be replaced by either style sheet driven text (ideally) or images.
Images
- No "ALT" tags are evident. This is not best practise for a number of reasons, such as support for screen readers for blind users and for browsers suppressing images or on slow internet connections.
- The button ribbon is a set of images. This is not best practise, and since the buttons are text anyway it should not be necessary for design purposes.
- The address information is contained in an image. This means the text is not selectable to copy/paste into another document such as a letter. I suggest this is undesirable.
- The page specific header images are inconsistent in text positioning. This can be seen by navigating from the market sectors page to the executives page and clicking the forward and back buttons while observing the "yourwebsite.com" text.
Web page layout
The layout of any web page is more art than science (at least until Search Engine Optimisation is considered, see below). Please view the comments below with that caveat.
Resizability
When the browser window is narrowed to less than 1024px, the body text disappears off the right side of the screen and the horizontal scroll bar appears. I suggest the text should automatically stay within the browser window.
Also seen when narrowing the window, the address image cannot be seen. I suggest that it should be relocated on the page (and not be an image, see above).
Element layout
I suggest that having the comments take up almost the entire visible text area on a standard 1024x786 screen is not the best idea. Viewed in this way the "why" is almost a footnote. I recommend that the "sectors" text in the lower half of the page is more likely to result in click-throughs to the web pages that are tailored to the audience, ensuring that they see the more targeted messages you need for a buying decision.
Consistency
The text in the title image should all be links. The "yourcompany.com" should go to the home page, the other text should go to the appropriate sector page.
Style and text
Recommendations text
From dealing with your company, I suggest that the recommendations shown do not reflect the very high standards you maintain. The first comment refers to the speed of turnaround, two others contain "WOW!", all have exclamation marks and so on. If these are genuine comments from customers I suggest rewriting them and asking for permission to use their name as attribution. Given your own excellent work in delivering clarity and gravitas in text form, this should be better.
Making the recommendations text a single line, changing periodically to display a new recommendation, would make the page more visually dynamic and save valuable space to get the other information visible. I would aim for a page that fits on a 1024x768 screen with no need to scroll, bearing in mind that I suspect many of your clients will be using laptops while searching for your service.
Typefaces
There appear to be at least four typefaces visible, in the title image, button ribbon, body text and the "click here to order..." image. This is not best practise and cheapens the look of the site.
Text selection
An unusual artefact is seen when selecting text. To observe this copy the text "perhaps your proposal will have less than 30 seconds...". You will see that the text cannot be selected completely. This was seen in Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 3.
Page titles
The page titles are all "yourcompany.com". For both readers and for SEO reasons these should be more descriptive, for example "yourcompany.com - professional services for Executives" or whatever. Each page should have a unique title.
General style comments
The site says "perhaps your proposal will have less than 30 seconds to capture the attention of a customer". Your home page has much less than 30 seconds! I feel it may not be structured in such a way as to drive clicks to other areas of the site. Is there a reason to stay on, or return to, the site? Perhaps show examples of bad proposal styles, many pages, rambling paragraphs, poor grammar and spelling and so on. Perhaps a list of commonly misspelled words and the correct spelling? Words to avoid?
Search Engine Optimisation
This is a specialist subject, but here are some initial comments:
- Page titles are important and should be unique and descriptive
- ALT text in images will ensure that web spiders can understand their content
- Metatdata is useful, but no longer the main driver for search engine rankings
- Keywords are important, ALT tags can be used to get them into a page without keyword spamming, which will negatively impact rankings. Interspersing other terms will assist.
- Style sheet and javascript elements should load as far down the page as possible. If needed, load the text into a javascript variable at the top of the page code and display it when needed.
- Heading tags do not contain many keywords relating to your business. Futher work is required to tailor these.
Additional information:
Talk to me! Call Ian Finlay on +44 (0) 7714 835897 or email at ian.finlay@theitdirector.com.
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