Site Reviews - Do It Yourself!

I have offered to review advertiser web sites and this is an outline of what I am looking for when I review a site. You can do this yourself or ask your web designer for their input and comments.

My objectives for your site are two fold:

1. Make your site easy to navigate and easy to use for our specifier and architect users.
2. Get as many referrals from the search engines as possible, for free.

Consider this article from Jakob Nielsen as a good starting spot - a well known and often cited as an expert on website usability. His article is entitled - Fix the Basics First.

I like these sites as examples to demonstrate that sites that work well need not be unattractive. These sites are not perfect on a detailed review, but may provide you guidance and ideas as to what I think works.

• Portafab - simple, elegant. You know exactly what they do. Note all the links at the bottom of the page - a great way to get your keywords up front.
• Stromberg Architectural Products - another clean site, and very different.

Here are the points I look for.

• Is the home page meaningful - no splash pages, good key words in description and title, sitemap to complete site and good links to key pages.
  • Key links on the home pages would include 3-part CSI-formatted specs, CAD details, LEED information and your contact information - including phone number.
  • A site map link on the home page will help the search engines find all your pages.
  • The description should be a maximum of 150 characters or so. The description is the text that appears below your title on Google and some other search engines.
• No frames on home page and other key pages - this is an older design technique that the search engines have trouble following.
• Do you have only one site or many? This is a bit complex to explain, but the search engines are trying to eliminate duplicate sites to improve their results. If your site at http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/ are the same, then you need to redirect one so only one appears. Eliminate any other older domain names that point to the same page and redirect them to just one URL address.
• Size and speed analysis - Here I use a website to provide size information of your home page - Website Optimization. A good target size is 30-50,000 bytes. Most sites are much bigger and need to go on a diet. [A better resource today is WebPageTest]
  • Portafab was 189,000 bytes, with most of the bytes in the images. I would severely crunch these images. On another site I reviewed, I was able to trim the large image from 125,000 bytes to 25,000 with little change in appearance.
  • Cover-All was 104,000 bytes, again with most of the bytes in the images. I crunch all the 4specs ad images to about 3-4,000 bytes and I think these images can be crunched quite a bit.
  • 4specs in comparison is 7,228 bytes, including the top image and CSS. I use mod_gzip to compress all of the html on 4specs, which is one reason 4specs feels fast. While a gzip or deflate would help the two sites above, the image crunch will be the first step. Gzip is easy to set up on a UNIX server, a bit more difficult on a Windows server. Even if your pages are small, a faster feel is always better.
• Next I go to the Firefox browser, using the HTML Validator and Web Developer plugins to provide more information about your site. You can find these on the Firefox website.
  • Going to view source, I look for the DOCTYPE on the top of the page. Using a current DOCTYPE and validating to this DOCTYPE will improve how your site appears. 4specs uses HTML 5 for most of our pages,
  • Next I look at the Tidy results. Tidy will tell you of any HTML errors on your page and make suggestions to correct them. Over time you will want all of your pages to completely validate to the DOCTYPE for best results.
  • I look at the amount of javascript. I recommend a minimum of javascript on your pages. Some designers use javascript for fancy stuff. I recommend against drop down boxes and prefer simple links on the left side of the page.
• Going to Google, I do a cache for your site: cache:www.example.com in the Google search box. Click on "Cached Text Only" to see what Google has in their database. The goal is to have all your key pages and key words and phrases in the cached database.
• Finally, what are your incoming links - this is best done with Yahoo or Search.MSN. Use the search term - links:www.example.com. This will tell you how many incoming links you have. Generally the more, and the better the links, the better you will be placed in the search engines.

Feedback is always appreciated.

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Colin Gilboy
Publisher - 4specs
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