Want a free check up on how your site compares with ‘best practice’ in terms of popularity, design, accessibility, and user experience?
“Sitescore”:http://www.silktide.com/tools/sitescore is a online tool that provides an automated rating of your site according to the above four criteria as well as incorporating a user rating feature.
h2. But Is It Useful?
Of course, it’s nice to see that SmileyCat.com currently warrants an “8.2 overall rating”:http://www.silktide.com/index.php?node=18444&form_refresh=0&form2=1&f2_url=www.smileycat.com&f2_ok=Test&pagetree=&editSessionid=&objectid=#testpoint_21, but is any of this information actually useful?
Well, yes and no. If you’re an experienced web designer then there’s not a lot new to learn here, although I suppose it’s handy to have all this information in one place. If you’re a bit of a statto like me, it’s always fun to look at yet more statistics about your web site.
If you’re less experienced, then I suppose this tool could provide some useful guidance as to where you should focus your efforts in improving your site. For example, do you need to focus more on marketing to bring in more traffic to your site, or is your user experience lacking when they get there? (Hint: focus on #1)
The user rating feature might be useful if you can get enough ratings. After all, what conclusions can you draw based on just a few ratings, which is what most sites are likely to have?
h2. Is It Accurate?
Again, yes and no. Some of the results seem to be a bit off. My site was marked down because it lacked meta tags. Well, I’m not sure which pages were tested, but I every page has at least a meta description tag, so I’m not sure what’s going on there.
On the other hand, it did find some incorrectly coded input tags on my contact page (now corrected).
The “Popularity on Google” feature is also a bit of a gimmick. Did I really need Sitescore to tell me that I rank #1 for the search phrase “Web Design Blog by Smiley Cat Web Design” (taken from my page title)?
h2. Too Many Features?
If you create an account, you get a bunch of additional technical reports, such as use of proper HTML, Flash, tables for layout and stylesheets. Apparently I use all of the above appropriately, although I would be interested to know what constitutes and improper use of Flash.
I also have an average of 47.8 links per page, which is supposedly excellent. What the heck does that mean?! Why is that ‘excellent’?
Some of these features strike me as being a little unnecessary, especially when there’s no explanation provided to go along with them. A more focused – and I would say, useful – report would come across better in my opinion, and would seem less “gimmicky”. A bit of 37Signals ‘less is more’ philosophy certainly wouldn’t go amiss.
Anyway, “check it out”:http://www.silktide.com/tools/sitescore and see for yourself. If you do, let me know how you got on – anyone got 8.2 beat?
I already knew this site, but I never used it. I checked my page today beacuse of your suggestion and the result: Summary score for this website was: 8.0 ( I guess I have to do a lot to get 10.0 ;o) ) Design:9.9, Accessibility 10.0 and Experience 9.6, but Marketing 6.9 ;O((
Heiko – 9.9 for design! You’re killing me on that category. I do like the layout of your site though. Good job on all your scores, in fact.
You’re always going to score low on marketing unfortunately because your site is not in English and so will you get fewer inbound links.
Perhaps you could write your more widely appealing posts in English so that you could gain a wider audience for them?
Thanks, this could be a useful tool or at least provide for some amusement. While you have to wonder how it determines some stats like “likely satisfaction”, it’s a good overview for websites.
I like the hotornot.com style voting system — websites are the perfect thing for it. The fact that most of the sites are from the web design sphere of the internet makes it interesting and pretty.
Dat, for me, the voting is a bit of a gimmick. I voted on a few sites and must have spent less than 5 seconds on each – certainly not long enough to form an educated opinion on the merits of the site.
So, I’d take votes on my site with a grain of salt – although I suppose some kind of indicator is better than none at all.