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Free Website Review!

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 7:19 am
by mattinahat
Hi,

I'm a partner in a Website Auditing and Development company and wanted to let everybody know we're offering, for a limited time, a free website review. We'll take a look at your website for free and let you know if there is any room for improvement or potential to make your website more effective for your business or organisation.

All we need is your name and website address and we'll do the rest. To take advantage of this just follow the link below!

http://www.bluestagstudio.co.uk/freereview.php

Many Thanks,
Matt.

Re: Free Website Review!

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 8:55 am
by onion2k
Just because I'm feeling generous, I'll review your site for you:

1. Your logo is a background image, therefore it can't link to the site index page as it does conventionally on most sites, nor does it have any alt text. To a disabled user your page might as well have no branding.
2. The telephone number and 'Email Us' links in the header are images rather than CSS styled text.
3. Your central image is being resized in the browser from 248px high down to 200px.
4. Your background gradient image is ~100kb. That's massive, especially if you're targeting users abroad (although as there's no internationalised versions I suspect that isn't the case).
5. Your pages aren't using URL rewriting for improved search engine placing so they have .php at the end, which is ugly.
6. Your contact form uses Javascript for validation. When Javascript is switched off it doesn't provide any feedback to the user when they submit an empty form.
7. Your font size control links stop working when Javascript is switched off instead of degrading to an HTML link that changes the size on the server (using sessions or cookies to remember the current size).
8. Your CSS link goes to a page that tells me it has 12 warnings. Eek.
9. "If you do wish for us to work with you then can look to develop your website to make it a more effective tool for your business." - I think that sentence is missing a word ... "then we can".
10. All the image titles are "Click to see more" rather than a descriptive or useful title specific to what the image represents.
11. Your Terms and Privacy policy links both open pages in popup windows without telling the user that's what will happen. That's slightly bad from a usability perspective.

That's all just on that one page. It's not good. And as you say yourself, "A more effective website = more profit.".

Re: Free Website Review!

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 1:05 pm
by mattinahat
Thanks for your feedback (although I would question the way in which it was delivered).

You're right, we certainly need to be practicing what we're preaching when it comes to our own website, although I would like to point out that some of your points are slightly flawed.

1. When we first built the site we were experimenting with the top banner somewhat, as such it was far easier during development to have it set as a background image, unfortunately it slipped through the net when we went live.
2. We do have our Email Us as an image, in the same way you would display an email address as an image to prevent spam, which is why we clearly state our contact details in CSS styled text on every single page as an alternative.
3. The central image is being resized, this is simply because we had two versions of the image and uploaded the wrong one on that particular page through our CMS. It has no impact on our users. The homepage shows the correct image.
4. Background image is large, but as you say we are not an international company and are targeting businesses in the UK and US, as such we have only had 0.7% of visits on a connection with a speed of less than 128Kb/sec. If in the future if we need to address this we will.
5. Agreed. Bad for SEO and ugly, although not affecting us on SEO as we're careful about our query strings. We need to address this ASAP and incorporate it into our CMS.
6. Our main concern was to get the website up and running, it's very simple to add server side validation to our forms as not everybody has javascript enabled. For the 90% plus people that do have javascript enabled this is not a problem.
7. Font size control is not important, in fact we are intending to remove it altogether as it creates accessibility issues in itself. Unfortunately those websites that do take accessibility into account all do it in different ways, and therefore partially sighted and the blind get frustrated having to learn how to change the font size on every individual site. Therefore those who truly need it don't actually use it. They use controls in their browser instead or use screen reading and zooming programs to take care of that for them. I spent 2 years at the Royal National College for the Blind where it became incredibly clear that this was the case. We're currently working on a high contrast, image free version of our site as well for those that may need it.
8. Our CSS is 100% valid. There are 12 warnings, this is because we haven't always defined both color and background color in our blocks, as you know CSS blocks by standard inherit from their parents, as such not everything always needs to be defined. This is why the validator has warned of this issue but has not rendered our CSS invalid. Which it isn't. It's simply not sure which elements we have placed where on our pages and as such has warned that if used incorrectly could cause problems. Clearly, in the world of Web 2.0, we need to add the definitions in but it has zero impact on our users.
9. Shocking. Our marketing guy would have a shock if he saw that, thanks for pointing that out.
10. Fail to see the problem here, title text is only shown in Firefox and it is perfectly clear what the images are relating to. In IE however the alt text shows up on hover instead of title, I do agree that the alt text is more descriptive than the title text and in all honesty was unaware until now that Firefox shows Title instead of Alt - Which is correct?
11. I think the user would be expecting the privacy policy and terms and conditions to pop up in a new window as that is the general convention.

What really surprises me is that you haven't picked up on some slightly more serious issues that we are in the process of rectifying.

At the moment the CMS we have built isn't pumping out 100% valid XHTML which in my mind is more important than atleast 9 of the points above you mentioned put together.

Also our CMS is currently using tables instead of CSS which again is not ideal in the slightest. Although due to the way in which we incorporate the CMS with our websites it's unlikely tables will ever need to be used unless it is for displaying tabular data.

Luckily, we're able to address these issues and have been concentrating on this as it is likely to have more of a direct effect on our visitors and our clients websites.

Re: Free Website Review!

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 2:21 pm
by onion2k
What really surprises me is that you haven't picked up on some slightly more serious issues that we are in the process of rectifying.

At the moment the CMS we have built isn't pumping out 100% valid XHTML which in my mind is more important than atleast 9 of the points above you mentioned put together.
It was a usability review from the perspective of a user. I wouldn't have bothered mentioning the CSS validation if you'd not linked to it.

If I was reviewing it properly, instead of just being a little facetious, I'd have been doing all sorts of thing like validating the code, seeing if there are any SQL injection or XSS attacks available in the form, checking out the server response headers... Besides, everyone writes sites in invalid XHTML, or even HTML, occasionally simply because IE6 sucks so much you practically have to unless you're willing to compromise the design.

I must say though, I'm impressed by your response. A lot of people would have either ignored my post or been rude about it. Coming back with proper well thought out answers is a very good sign that you're serious about this stuff.

Re: Free Website Review!

Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 10:06 am
by mattinahat
In hindsight I can understand the reason you responded the way you did, i quickly realised that I had posted a commercial 'advert' for a free review service on a forum full of experts that offer free reviews...my apologies.

The response I gave you was mostly taken off the top of my head as we have discussed almost all of those issues in depth when implementing the website. This will surprise you but I've always been the one that's been banging on about web standards! Until recently I've always been 100% for following every standard and every accessibility guideline there is. But when we sat down and looked at our target market for our website we quickly noticed that many of the guidelines didn't really apply and could actually hinder our site.

A perfect example is the 100kb background image. Any more than 20kb is generally unacceptable, yet 100% of our target market would be using a connection more than fast enough to absorb the one off 100kb image and cache it in almost the same time it would do a 20kb image. We couldn't reduce the image size any further without making the gradient obvious or the pattern invisible. So do we reduce the quality of the image or change the design to accomodate 0% of people and give the other 100% a more efficient but less appealing site? Guidelines say that's exactly what you should do, but we just can't see the benefits.

This is just one of many many discussions we had about web standards and guidelines. We decided in the end that guidelines are a starting point, but if at any point our users expectations are different to what the guidelines suggest then we should adapt the site accordingly, and that's what we've done. The whole point of accessibility and usability guidelines is to ensure that developers keep their users requirements in mind and our users feel that, on the whole, we have done that.

I know what we've done isn't 100% approved by other web developers, but the feedback from users has been absoloutely fantastic, and our assumptions and research into connection speeds, colours, javacsript etc turned out to be spot on according to google analytics, so we've done far better than anticipated. In fact my business partner has proved a point to me because I was reluctant to let some guidelines slip but it's worked out for the better!

Saying all of this I completely see that we are telling people that we can give them a more effective site whilst our own isn't built 100% compliantly, but many of our clients will be business2home instead of business2business in which case it's back to 800x600, web safe colours and small background images!!

Tell you what though, I've never noticed that Firefox shows Image Title, and IE shows Image Alt on hover. I find that a little disturbing! Would love to find out which one is actually standards compliant, or if there is any such standard.

Also completely agree with you about a couple of your points, we've definately been a little sloppy when it comes to going live, should have added server side validation straight away and fixed the background image logo problem.

Really appreciate your last post, I'm glad it's clear that we DO take users interests at heart, but I can understand why, through a web developers eye, our site appears not to do so. Think that needs addressing and I'm glad you've brought it to our attention!

Many thanks.

Re: Free Website Review!

Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 10:39 am
by matthijs
If you don't mind I've got a few more points.
- why is the link color blue different or not matching from the other blues on the site? The link color looks like the default blue and contrasts in an ugly way with the other blues (of course, just my opinion).
- is it really necessary to agree to the terms and conditions when someone submits the form? Seems a bit formal to me if it's just an inquiry.
"Welcome to our website. If you continue to browse and use this website, or you contact us in any way, you are agreeing to comply with and be bound by the following terms and conditions of use, which together with our privacy policy govern Blue Stag Studio’s relationship with you in relation to this website. ....."
- I think the copy of the site can be improved. I'm not a native English speaker so I might be wrong, but still. For example:
"It's quite easy to find a website design company, just type website design cardiff into Google, but to find a website design company with the right balance of people that can truly make your website work for your business is a little harder."
I'm sure this can be rewritten a bit to make it easier to read.
- The double "welcome" on the homepage: wouldn't one be enough?

Last, I don't quite understand the issue about onion2k's response. He took the time to look at your site and give an honest and probably valuable reply to your question for critique. Was his reply too harsh?

Anyway, hope you can do something with this reply. Good luck with your site and business!

Re: Free Website Review!

Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 11:06 am
by mattinahat
See what you mean about the link colours - that seems to be a recent development after making modifications to our CMS, thanks for picking up on that.

In regards to the terms and conditions we've made it a requirement to agree to the terms and conditions prior to signing up to a Free Website Review purely because as part of their review we will be recommending our other products and services if relevant. This is marketing and therefore our users need to know they can opt out of this. This is different to if a user contacts us via the quick contact form or contact us page as by doing that they are actively seeking information on our products and services.

While our Terms and Conditions state that simply by browsing the site a user agrees to them, we felt it was a bit unfair that they weren't prompted to read them before signing up to something!

Our marketing guy has gone through the copy on the site and we have made a few changes since, so we will run it past him again.

Double welcome is probably a little much. In fact, personally, I don't like the double heading thing we have going on on every single page, I'd rather jump straight into the content.

As onion2k said, his reply was a little fesecious as I wasn't technically asking for critique, was practically advertising so I understand why and don't have any issue with it at all, and appreciate the time he took to give me honest feedback as opposed to simply deleting the post.

Thanks for your feedback though, appreciate that and will look at making some changes, in particular the link colour.

Re: Free Website Review!

Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 11:10 am
by mattinahat
Also, just to point out I am aware of another issue.

In IE6, the 8 boxes we have under What We Do on the homepage look great in Firefox and IE7+, but due to the lack of support for :hover IE6 users will find that when they roll over the boxes the text goes from white to dark grey but the black background box doesn't change. Clearly this is crap. We're just deciding on the best way around it at the moment.

(Hope that saves someone some typing!)

Re: Free Website Review!

Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 11:36 pm
by The_Anomaly
onion2k wrote:Just because I'm feeling generous, I'll review your site for you:

1. Your logo is a background image, therefore it can't link to the site index page as it does conventionally on most sites, nor does it have any alt text. To a disabled user your page might as well have no branding.
2. The telephone number and 'Email Us' links in the header are images rather than CSS styled text.
3. Your central image is being resized in the browser from 248px high down to 200px.
4. Your background gradient image is ~100kb. That's massive, especially if you're targeting users abroad (although as there's no internationalised versions I suspect that isn't the case).
5. Your pages aren't using URL rewriting for improved search engine placing so they have .php at the end, which is ugly.
6. Your contact form uses Javascript for validation. When Javascript is switched off it doesn't provide any feedback to the user when they submit an empty form.
7. Your font size control links stop working when Javascript is switched off instead of degrading to an HTML link that changes the size on the server (using sessions or cookies to remember the current size).
8. Your CSS link goes to a page that tells me it has 12 warnings. Eek.
9. "If you do wish for us to work with you then can look to develop your website to make it a more effective tool for your business." - I think that sentence is missing a word ... "then we can".
10. All the image titles are "Click to see more" rather than a descriptive or useful title specific to what the image represents.
11. Your Terms and Privacy policy links both open pages in popup windows without telling the user that's what will happen. That's slightly bad from a usability perspective.

That's all just on that one page. It's not good. And as you say yourself, "A more effective website = more profit.".
This is awesome on so many levels.