If you use Joomla! then you shouldn’t miss OpenCamp Dallas - August 27-29 (http://openca.mp).  Not only will you have the opportunity to improve your Joomla! skills, there will be other tracks featuring Drupal, WordPress and New Media so you can broaden your knowledge and  learn how the other CMS platforms work.

Awesome Speakers

From building templates to integrating Joomla! with external apps we have some absolutely incredible and talented speakers coming.  Attending their workshops is sure to make your Joomla! sites better looking and more effective.  Our speakers list can be found here.  More are being added all the time.

The State of Joomla!

Hear from Ryan Ozimek, President of Open Source Matters (the Joomla! project’s managing body).  Learn about the state of Joomla!, what to expect in the future and how you can get involved in the Joomla! community.

Get Your Questions Answered

At our Genius Bar we will have Joomla! experts on hand to help you solve your real problems.

Parties, parties, parties

All work and no play?  Absolutely not – once the sessions end, the fun begins.  Join us for drinks and music at the sponsored parties.

Ten Things a Modern Website Should Do

This is part 3 of our series on evaluating your website. After evaluating your existing site we will now examine some characteristics that your site should posses. Your website should...

1. Speak to its audience
2. Be search engine friendly
3. Use a content management system (CMS)
4. Include search
5. Have a professional design
6. Limit use of custom code
7. Be interactive
8. Track analytics
9. Have a “Call to Action”
10. Contain appropriate content

Your Website Should… Speak to its Audience

This is really a two-part item as before you can speak to your audience you must know who your audience truly is. Simply put, your #1 objective when building a website is to know exactly what your visitors want and then give it to them. This is an impossible task if you never stop to think of who you are speaking to and what they want to see. Step one of this is accepting that your audience is not everyone. You need to be specific. The more you know about them the more that you can give them what they want to see.

Your Website Should… Be Search Engine Friendly (SEF)

Search engine friendly (SEF) means that your site is easy for search engines to index and understand. Failure to make your site search engine friendly means that you will rank lower in results than your competitors who are actively trying to improve the way their sites are read by search engines. You make your site SEF by enabling SEF URLs on your website, by having well organized and relevant content, by using header tags and meta tags properly and by putting alt tags on images. There are numerous resources available which discuss ways to make your site more search engine friendly and search engine optimized (SEO). As you build, rebuild, or update your site attention should be paid to making your site easy for search engines to digest.

Your Website Should… Use a Content Management System (CMS)

Not that many years ago it was standard practice to build your website by having an actual file for each page. You would have an index.html page, a contact_us.html page, etc. Managing hundreds or thousands of files was unwieldy and immensely time-consuming and error-prone. Enter the content management system (CMS). A CMS stores your content, be it text content, images, multimedia content and other content in a database and then displays the content you select based on a menu structure that you build. Users no longer need to update content using HTML and instead can just use WYSIWYG editors. Site content and structure can be worked with from anywhere that has a web browser. No more DreamWeaver, FrontPage, or other web editing software is necessary. CMS-based sites also have consistent design across pages due to the fact that you build templates for your site. This means that to change site design you only must change a single template instead of applying a change to lots and lots of individual pages. The list goes on and on, but with few exceptions all new websites should be CMS based.

Your Website Should… Include a Search

An inherent quality of content management systems is that all content is stored in, or referenced by a database. Databases were built to be queried against and therefore it is easy to build search features into a site if it is CMS based. If not, there are other ways to add a search function to your site, but it becomes slightly more complex. As your site grows your content becomes more difficult to find even if it’s well organized. Giving your audience the ability to just search for what they want feeds their desire to get to information quickly and will make them happy. If a visitor can’t find what they want very quickly then they’ll just go somewhere else where they can find it. Including a search gives them a chance to find anything with a single word and click. A very powerful feature indeed.

Your Website Should… Have a Professional Design

Repeat after me, “I am not a designer.”

Your experience playing with MS Publisher, or doing your church’s newsletter does not qualify you as a designer. Okay, now that you have come to terms with this fact we can move on. Your visitors know what good design is and what bad design is and bad design is more often than not a deal breaker (read: they will give your competitors who have good design their money before giving it to you). Building your website using a professional design is essential to your success. Your goal here is to select a design that works functionally with what your site does and that appeals to your audience (see, here we are again needing to know what our audience expects). Professional design can either be a template that you buy and have someone modify for you (the inexpensive method) or a fully custom design (the more expensive and more effective method). Your budget, timeline and needs will dictate which road you take, but whichever way you go, do it with a professional who has experience and can guide you.

Your Website Should… Limit Use of Custom Code

When building a site and working with your team, be sure to ask them what will happen when new versions of your CMS and other applications come out. If you have lots of custom code and upgrade any of your software things often break. This means more time and money is necessary to keep your site current and to make changes. By limiting your custom code and using pre-built components and applications as often as possible you make your upgrade path easier and will have far superior support than if your site has extensive custom coding. This absolutely does not mean to eliminate custom code, but when you do it be sure that to consider both what happens when you want to upgrade your systems as well as what happens if your developer decides to leave.

Your Website Should… Be Interactive

Web development has moved beyond distributing information to people via one-way communication. People now demand the ability to interact with your content whether it’s commenting on what has been posted, signing up for your newsletter, or befriending other site visitors. Taking advantage of being able to have a conversation directly with your customers can benefit your organization in many ways and if you’re not leveraging modern web components to open this dialog then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to build trust and awareness with your customers. All new web deployments should include at least a base level of interactivity.

Your Website Should… Track Analytics

Web analytics let us track the exact path your visitors are taking, where they are entering and exiting your site and so much more. If you use Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) there is not even any cost for collecting and managing this information. Knowing what your site visitors are interested in and what’s making them go away gives you the ability to build on your site successes and hot sections and fix the places that are making your visitors disappear. Take advantage of this data because it can be incredibly powerful.

Your Website Should… Have a “Call to Action”

Stop assuming your visitors will do what you want them to do on the site and start telling them to do it! People are on your site for a reason. You should know this reason and tell your visitors how to accomplish their desired tasks as prominently and often as you can. Think of an association site that has a “Join Now” button on every page. It’s pretty clear what you want your visitors to do. Now imagine the same site that has a “membership” section and the join now is just a link in the membership menu. Which works better? Clearly the former and the reason is simple. You know your audience, what they want and now you’re giving it to them.

Your Website Should… Contain Appropriate Content

Appropriate content is content that is what your audience wants to see. It should be well formatted, contain no spelling errors and use graphics and images often enough to be effective and not so often that it’s distracting. The text on your site should be concise and speak using terms and phrases that you think people would be searching for in search engines because your content is going to be indexed by search engines and then queried against. Make sure that you either create your own content, or are using other peoples stuff (images, text) only with their permission. Your content should also be updated on a regular basis as this encourages both your visitors as well as search engines to come back frequently. On your website content is king. It’s what people are there to see and it’s up to you to make sure that what you’re delivering to your visitors looks great, speaks to them and is making them come back for more. If you are uncomfortable writing your own content, hire a copywriter with experience writing for the web.

Conclusion

We could go on and on for this topic, but the overall idea here is that you know your audience and you give them what they want both now and in the future in a well-organized, great looking and intuitive manner.

This article was written by Sam Wettling, interactive development manager for Launch Interactive Media based out of Austin, TX.  Twitter: @swettling Blog: http://www.launchinteractivemedia.com/index.php/blog/blogger/swettling/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/samwettling

The purpose of the past several posts is to give you some methods to examine and review your existing website.  The key here is that you are actually taking the time to do at least a base level of  maintenance on your website and to make you, as a business owner or manager, aware of some common mistakes being made and old ways of thinking.  You have a tremendous opportunity online to position your business as a leader in your market segment.  The only thing keeping you from reaching that goal is you.  As people say, "you only have once chance to make a first impression," and online you have the unique opportunity to make that experience as good or as bad for your visitors as you want. What have you chosen?

In our next post we will discuss features and functions that new websites should have and the value and importance of each including more on content management systems, search engine friendly (SEF) content and sites, seach engine optimization (SEO), blogging, using social media and more.

One of the greatest features of the Internet and websites is that you can track nearly everything that your users are doing.  This is impossible with all other forms of media.  Taking advantage of this fact is easy to do and free.

1.    How many people visited your site last month?

If the answer is “I don’t know,” then you’re behind the curve.  Web analytics are free (http://www.google.com/analytics) and essential to proper site design and marketing.  If you don’t know which of your content is popular, or where people are dropping off your site then you won’t be able to make the necessary adjustments to improve the site.

2.    What is the most popular content on your website?

As above, you should be able to identify key areas of your website and how frequently they are visited.  You can then build upon these successes in future content iterations so that you are giving your visitors what they want.  Deploying a content management system to manage your site will make gathering this kind of statistics extremely easy.  Because this information is readily available and farily black-and-white, you need to begin relying on this data and stop relying on assumptions that things are effective or that you know what visitors are doing on your site.

3.    Are you collecting user information on your site (name/email at least)?

If you have a website then you should give your users the opportunity to give you their personal information.  They’re on your site for a reason already and often don’t mind sharing this information if they know they’ll get something out of it like a coupon they can bring into your store, or a holiday discount, or just a quarterly newsletter from your company saying what’s going on.  This is a great way to remind past customers about you and to encourage them to come back to the site as well.  With so many tools out there that enable you to create an ongoing dialog with your customers, you should take advantage and give your visitors and customers what they want.  Please note that there are laws regulating how you contact people from online forms and there are also best practices.  Be sure to do your research before emailing people.

4.    Do users have the ability to respond to, or rate any of your content?

Gone are the days of websites being one-way streets.  People want to share their opinions and thoughts and you should listen.  Giving your customers the opportunity to rate your content products often scares business owners and managers.  After all, what if someone says something bad about your products?  First, these applications allow you to moderate comments made, so you can manage visitors that just go nuts and type all kinds of horrible things.  However, if a user legitimately has a concern about one of your products or services wouldn’t you rather fix the issue?  People know you aren’t perfect and if they see that you are responding to the needs and concerns of your customers then they will realize that your goal of keeping them happy is being met.  Also, this might let you know if some of your content or products are just plan crappy and allows you to adjust your business accordingly.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Evaluation Conclusion

Properly written, frequently updated and easy to find content are critical to the success of your website.  Think of your website as a living organism and the content its food.  In order to keep your site healthy and looking good you need to feed it on a regular basis.  Well fed sites rank higher in search engines and drive repeat traffic.  Content starved, or more specifically update-starved sites fall by the wayside in search engine rankings and give people no reason to come back.

1.    Is your content searchable?

If your website was written from scratch then it’s likely that you don’t have a search.  People expect that function and you should give it to them.  There are some modules you can add to static sites, but your best bet is migrating to a content management system where searching is a built-in function.  This is especially important if you have lots of, or complex content.

2.    How often do you update your website?

I can’t tell you how many times I ask this question only to hear “never”.  Believe it or not, people want to hear what your business is doing, so tell them!  Beyond just informing your customers that you are alive and your business is busy doing things, search engines will love you if your content changes regularly.  The more it changes the more they’re forced to come back because it’s in their best interest to stay current also.  If your content never changes, your site will invariably be ranked lower than some with frequently updated content.  There are numerous ways to keep your content fresh and we will discuss some in the next installment.  Suffice it to say that if you are never updating your site then you are probably getting very few repeat visitors and your search engine rank is very low.

3.    How do you let people know about the updates?

Supposing you are actually updating your site, the next challenge is to figure out how to let people know.  This is another topic of discussion for the next installment, but in short, you need to let people know on your site that content has been updated (cross-linking and self promotion) and externally that content has changed via other outlets like social media, partner sites and blogs and more.  Some changes like adding inventory is not as critical as other updates like press releases but the objective for all of them is to drive new and repeat traffic to your site.

4.    Was your content ported from your company’s printed marketing materials to the web?

Web design is different from print design and unless a person with web experience made the translation, your web content might not be up to par.  It is common for companies to take pamphlets, flyers, newsletters and other print media and try to convert the content word for word to their websites.  This is bad practice.  What you can do is take the ideas and concepts that you are writing about as well as the overall design theme and build your website around this, but just copying and pasting is not advisable.  Content for web needs to be written slightly differently and most certainly formatted differently in order for it to make sense.

5.    Are you advertising other people’s stuff on your website (i.e. do you have banner or other ads on your site)?

We will start with the one exception to this.  If you are running a website whose entire existence is to generate ad revenue through traffic then clearly you need ads for other people’s things on your site.  However, if you are a standard business or a corporation and you have banner ads on your site then you need to print up all of those ads and paste them on your building or storefront for everyone to see because that’s all you’re doing on your website.  The people that design these ads are building them to attract people to their sites.  If they go to their site then guess what, they’re no longer on yours.  The $.05 generated by the click is probably not enough to offset the cost of a lost customer.  Stop advertising for other people.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

The best design and navigation in the world is worthless if it requires a specific browser or application to run it, or if it generates errors at any point while visitors are on the site.

1.    Does any page on your site take more than four seconds to load?

Four seconds is a long time when you’re trying to just get to some information.  Imagine it taking four seconds for you to flip the page in a book.  Reading it wouldn’t be any fun.  Your website is no different.  Test it on fast and slow connections to see how everything loads.  Properly written code, limited scripting, proper use (not over use) of graphics and good hosting all contribute to the page load speed.  If any of your pages are taking this long to load then fix them.  People won’t complain about them, they will just leave and find somewhere else that has content that loads at a proper speed.

2.    Does your site force people do download plugins to work properly?

The only plugin that you should ever think about using on your website is Adobe Flash.  If users are required to download anything else then your site doesn’t work right.  People aren’t on your site to do anything but get information or buy things.  Stop making them do more work than is necessary to accomplish these tasks.

3.    Are you using Microsoft FrontPage or Word to create web pages?

If the answer to this is yes then you can skip the rest of this series and go to the part where we discuss complete redesigns and rebuilds.  FrontPage is fine for kids doing school projects.  It is not an acceptable tool to build professional websites.  FrontPage and Word violate a great number of standard web rules and put in absolutely huge amounts of code where none is needed.  This makes your pages extremely slow and frequently they don’t work on non IE browsers.  Again, if you are using FrontPage or Word then it’s time for a rebuild.  You will love some of the other tools that are out there and they’re no more difficult to use than what you are used to.

4.    Are you using any kind of content management system to manage your website?  If so, what?

Content management systems (CMS) are pieces of software that reside on the web server which help you manage the structure, navigation, design and content on your website.  If you are currently just uploading pages via FTP then odds are that you are not using a CMS.  You should be.  CMS have built in search engine friendly features and have the ability for you to drop in plug-ins and modules that extend and expand the function of your website with little or no coding.  They also allow full searches of your content by default and offer a host of features that make your content easy to manage and update.  The best part is that many of them are free (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, DotNetNuke).  The days of editing your web pages in DreamWeaver, FrontPage, or other HTML editors are over.  This is a subject that there are thousands of articles about, but in this case not using a CMS is not good.

5.    Did you know what your website looks like in browsers other than Internet Explorer?

Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari all have sizable market shares and all display content differently and you should absolutely test your site in all of them.  If you have not and don’t want to install a bunch of browsers on your computer just go to http://browsershots.org/ and type in your URL.  It will display the site for you and let you see how it looks in multiple browsers.  Do not, however, assume that your visitors are coming to your site only on Internet Explorer.  A sampling of browser statistics from November 2009 is:

(Data from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Content & Updates

Good navigation is critical for three reasons.  First and foremost so your visitors can find what they want.  Second, so search engines can find and organize your information in their indexes.  Lastly so you know where to put new information easily and quickly.  The key to success with your navigation is your ability to categorize and organize your information into sections that make sense and then your ability to add both information and new categorizations over time with minimal effort on your part.

1.  Does your navigation scheme make sense to someone that knows nothing about your company or products?

If you are a paint company and your navigation scheme looks like a color wheel this might seem cute and fun, but is impractical and probably doesn’t make sense to many of your non-professional painters.  Try http://www.bow-wowbooks.com/.  While this site has any number of other issues, its complete lack of navigation makes it impossible for visitors to get to what they need.  This is the opposite of what you should be trying to do.  Your goal is to get people to the content they want as fast as possible.

2.  How many clicks does it take you to get from the homepage to critical information?

You may have heard of the “Three Click Rule” in which users should be able to retrieve their desired information within three clicks.  On small sites this may be true, but the underlying concept of taking time to consider critical paths is really what this is all about.  A well constructed navigation and well organized and commented content allows for this.  This also means that you should always be thinking about what “critical information” is to your visitors.  This information might change and if it does, you should be aware of this and adapt.  If you don’t know what visitors are looking for, or haven’t even tried to get to it yourself then it’s going to be hard to make these determinations.  Sit down at your own website and pretend to be a customer and find the information, or have someone that isn’t intimately familiar with your business do this and observe them.  If you, or they are getting frustrated or lost then so are your customers and guess what, they're going elsewhere.

3.  Do you have to manually update HTML or other code in order to add a menu item?

Having to manually update code to add pages or menu items is extremely error prone.  You don’t want visitors browsing to broken pages.  In addition to being error prone, having to manually update code to add pages is time consuming and unless your HTML is properly formatted, might also make your site very non-search engine friendly.

4.  Do you have any broken links, or Under Construction pages on your site?

Broken links are like having a door in a store that leads into a brick wall.  It doesn’t take walking face-first into one very many times before customers go elsewhere.   Having "Under Construction" is as bad, or worse.  If your content isn’t available, then it isn’t available. Either write the content and post it, or don't put up links until you do have the content.  Imagine going to CNN's website to look for an article only to find out that the only part that was written was the title and the rest of it is "coming soon."  You wouldn't go back.  Your visitors are no different.

5.  Did you perform any usability testing on your navigation scheme before launching your site?

This might sound daunting, but it isn’t.  Grab a couple friends, family members, co-workers and have them each attempt to do the same task.  Observe them and see how they accomplish it and then ask them to comment.  Such tasks might be “locate product X” or “submit a request for service Y” or “purchase twenty widgets.”  Ideally you do this before launching your site the first time, but if your site is already live then still have them do it.  After these tasks are done ask them not only how easy or difficult was it to do, but how they feel about it.  What you find might be eye-opening.  Not everyone looks for information the same way and people react differently  to any difficulties they have trying to do these tasks.  Your goal is to make your site easy to navigate and use for everyone, not just you.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Technical Attributes

Let’s face it, if your design sucks people won’t stick around. Period. Why would they? You wouldn’t shop in a store with cluttered shelves, carpet on the walls and a crazy person in the back popping up to remind you that you’re the millionth visitor when right next door is a store selling the same goods and services with clean, well organized stock, friendly service and no distractions. People are visiting your website and in their minds your website is a direct reflection of the quality of your business. Crummy website = crummy business. The inverse is also true and something you can and should take advantage of. If you’re a small business with a stellar website you have a great opportunity to put yourself on a level playing field with the big boys.

1. It is immediately apparent to a casual visitor what your company does (have a non-employee do this)?

At first, asking a question like this might sound absurd, but it is If by just scanning your homepage a visitor cannot immediately determine the purpose of your site and your business then you are doing something wrong. Plus, if a real person can’t tell what you do then it’s fairly certain that search engines also will have no clue what you do and therefore will rank your page lower than you would like.

2. Does your logo look professionally made? Be honest.

If you didn’t pay a professional to do your logo and instead used either a pre-packaged one or had a friend or relative do it for free then there is a very good chance that your logo looks like it was done by an amateur… because it was. Remember that done right, your logo will provide you with [good] brand recognition. People often balk at spending a few dollars here, but this logo will affect the design of both your online and your printed materials and if it starts off looking bad then you can expect subsequent marketing materials to follow suit.

3. Is your site at all [handicap] accessible?

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has published guidelines (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/) to use to ensure that your website can be browsed by individuals limited or no sight, vision and movement. In order for many of these people to browse the web they need the assistance of special tools that either magnify the screen or read the content aloud to them. While it may sound like a daunting task to make your site accessible, the truth is that by at least working toward a base level of accessibility you are helping all of your visitors. The core guidelines basically state to:

Separate structure from presentation. This means don’t make your entire site in Flash, or out of images. This also means use proper underlying tags to format and frame your content.

Provide text and text equivalents. This means that your site should have text (duh) and that any images on your site are tagged with text describing the images. This is good for accessibility as well as to make your site search engine friendly (SEF). Doing this kills two birds with one stone.

Make content understandable and navigable. This means using proper links on the site for navigation, proper headers and limiting your use of non-traditional navigation, linking and page orientation.

By following these guidelines when developing your site you are opening it up to a greater number of visitors as well as using proper techniques to make your site more understandable and usable for everyone.

4. Did you purchase images and graphics for your website?

If your website has clip art from your Microsoft Word, or images that you just found online and saved or simply contains no images then this is a red flag. As we mentioned earlier, your visitors can tell the difference between quality and junk and if you’re using clip art then you are leaning toward the latter. Secondly, if you just borrowed some images from other websites then you are stealing and breaking the law. Also not good. Purchasing images can be extremely cheap ($1-$10 each in many cases) and make your site look far more professional (probably because the images are done by professionals). Please note that when I say images, I do not mean only photos. This includes backgrounds, illustrations, etc.

5. Does your site have a consistent look and feel on every page?

If your site has five different sections, one for each line of products you sell and every section has different fonts, backgrounds and branding just so your visitors understand that they’re in a different section then you are not only insulting the intelligence of your visitors, but you have made a lot more work for yourself come time to update the site. Or, if you have simply hand-coded every single page and are not using any consistent template or formatting across any pages then you’re in real trouble when you want to add new content or change a layout.

The key here is to choose a format that works for what your objectives are and run with it. You can customize each page a bit with images and text, but being consistent is critical from a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint as well as from a visitor sanity standpoint. If Sony can sell DVDs, computers, service plans and digital book readers (www.sonystyle.com) using the same formatting then your business can offer service X and widget Y using consistent formatting and styling.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next: Navigation

One of my past bosses once told me that nobody is irreplaceable. He was being honest, not mean in any way. Your website is no different. Every time someone visits your website they are determining whether to hire or fire you. Does your website beg continued employment, or say “I don’t need your business”?

In step one of the series we asked you to review your own website on a variety of criteria. In this installment we will examine common red flags with regard to your website and why each can be hazardous to your online success.

We will break this section down into five parts

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next: Design

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