You have less than five seconds to impress upon your website visitors that they should do business with your company. What does your website say in those first few, critical seconds? Unfortunately, the answer is all too often “go to our competitor’s site.” The point of this article is to help business owners and stakeholders understand how they can objectively evaluate their existing web presences and make educated decisions about where to go next.

This blog series will have the following posts:

1. How to Evaluate Your Website
2. Evaluate Your Website
3. Ten Things a Modern Website Should Do
4. To Repair or Rebuild?
5. Plan for Success

Before we start

Our goal here is to help you think critically about your website and quite possibly think about your site in ways you never imagined. We will discuss such topics as SEF, SEO, analytics, information architecture and more, but none of these technologies or techniques matters if the average user (you) navigates to a website and your first gut reaction about the site is negative. So, the first step will be for you to open a new browser window, clear the cache (this is important) and enter the address for your company. After exactly five seconds have passed, close the window and record a number on a scale from one to ten regarding your overall impression of your website. Ten being the best site you’ve ever seen and one being the World’s Worst Website. This is also a good exercise to do with a neutral third party.

Your Score ______

Step 1: The Evaluation

I will suggest going through this process with someone else’s website first. You don’t have to write does your answers, but just read through this list while examining someone else’s site. This will get you thinking critically about design and data. We’ll get to yours soon enough. This is by no means a totally comprehensive list of questions you should be asking, but just some to get you headed in the right direction and to figure out if your site needs help, or if things are just fine.

In our next post we will begin to examine each of these topics and the importance of each relating to your website.

Design

1. It is immediately apparent to a casual visitor what your company does (have a non-employee do this)?
2. Does your logo look professionally made? Be honest.
3. Is your site at all [handicap] accessible?
4. Did you purchase images for your website?
5. Does your site have a consistent look and feel on every page?

Navigation

1. Does your navigation scheme make sense to someone that knows nothing about your company or products?
2. How many clicks does it take you to get from the homepage to critical information?
3. Do you have to manually update HTML or other code in order to add a menu item?
4. Do you have any broken links, or Under Construction pages on your site?
5. Did you perform any usability testing on your navigation scheme before launching your site?

Technical Attributes

1. Does any page on your site take more than four seconds to load?
2. Does your site force people do download plugins to work properly?
3. Are you using Microsoft FrontPage or Word to create web pages?
4. Are you using any kind of content management system to manage your website? If so, what?
5. Did you know what your website looks like in browsers other than Internet Explorer?

Content & Updates

1. Is your content searchable?
2. How often do you update your website?
3. How do you let people know about the updates?
4. Was your content ported from your company’s printed marketing materials to the web?
5. Are you advertising other people’s stuff on your website (i.e. do you have banner or other ads on your site)?

Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

1. How many people visited your site last month?
2. What is the most popular content on your website?
3. Are you collecting user information on your site (name/email at least)?
4. Do users have the ability to respond to, or rate any of your content?

Stay tuned for next week when I discuss each of these items in more depth and how each can help or hider your success online.

Next: Part 2 - Evaluate Your Website