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Evaluate the Quality of Your Website

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Website Quality

Sometimes we may have enough content on our website, and we think we are already visible online despite the fact that visitors are not taking any actions and they are not returning back. The main reason for this might lie with the effectiveness of your website.

Maintaining a website, especially a corporate and monetized one, involves continuous updates and activities, as the internet is growing and changing everyday. Some points, experiments and continuous studies are vital to keep up to date with the changes.

See some of the attributes that you should check to evaluate your website:

  1. Accessibility Your visitors should be able to easily connect with your website. The areas where you want your visitors to take actions should also be in a strategic and accessible location.You should find out if your website complies with the current web standards. If not, some contents might not be displayed well or accessible to your visitors. Your website should not just be accessible on various browsers but also on various devices such as mobile phones, ipads, tablets and other devices where your customers would access your website from.Your hosting might also affect your accessibility. Choose a hosting provider that is always up and provides reasonable bandwidth.
  2. Navigation Your website navigation should be organized well. It is the main portal for your visitor to explore your other pages. Unorganized navigation may only keep your visitor on your homepage and just leave. To gain more traffic, especially for your inner pages, have your navigation beautiful and well-displayed.Check if there are organized paths directing you to relevant pages. Verify that your navigation is visible, as much of the time the navigation does get over powered with the text and the content of the site.
  3. Design Common sense means that an ugly website will drive visitors away and good looking design can create lasting impressions. The latter can gain more interests and trust from your visitors. Over time, a website can look outdated and the design gets old.With this, choose a unique design but is still good-looking. Uniqueness of a website requires crucial creativity and efforts on your part. With so many websites online, no one can truly claim uniqueness, hence, just being one of those few yet attractive websites can be a great goal to charm more visitors. Many times, viewers prefer a simple layout and plain colors. Make sure your colors and graphics complement the overall theme and your website’s objective.Your site design must also complement the nature of your business. If you are running a media site, the choice of bright and darker colors can be good. But if you are running a blog site, light and plain colors are advisable for page contents to be readable.
  4. Content If you want to be visible in search engines, you should post relevant and consistently updated content. Creating a blog can also help your website be effective. This can be your avenue to interact with your visitors, update them with the latest news about your brand, and invite them to do complete actions like sign up with your latest promos.People are going online because they want some information, they need help, or they want to have interactions with others. Make sure your content is written well, easy to understand, helpful and answers questions or needs. Your media content, such as images or videos, must also be in fair resolutions, not too blurry yet not too high to prevent slow loading.
  5. Security Security is very vital, especially if you are running an ecommerce site or anything that directs your visitors into paying for something. Verify that your payment gateways are using secured hosting and if your visitors’ information is protected.
  6. Marketing One of the main things one should consider after launching their website is how they will be marketing the site online and offline. You can test various marketing strategies to see which one works for you and your target audience. You can evaluate your marketing plans regularly to ensure that it’s still working and whether any changes are needed.Some of the online marketing you should consider as part of managing your website online is SEO, Socail Media Marketing, and PPC (Pay Per Click such as Google AdWords).

quality website

Evaluating based on the above points can help you enhance your website and ensure that it’s up to date in order to gain more traffic and establish a dominant reputation online.

About

Wasim’s a project manager at Alrayes Web Solutions along with an online SEO consultant & blogger for business at wasimismail.com, specialising in online business.

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{ 34 Responses }

  1. Dave says:
    It is very important to constantly improve content. Search engines love it. And always be thinking about possible improvements to the usability too.
  2. PsDude says:
    I will try to follow your advice and evaluate my site true value, at the unique content I am ok , maybe the other things are not optimized well :)
  3. Mark says:
    Number 4...Content, i.e. relevant and unique content, in my opinion, is THE most relevant thing to have regardless of how you promote your website. Honestly, with respect to the appearance, I feel that if you navigation is easy to use, then appearance can fall by the wayside, a little at least. Personally, I intentionally chose a theme that looked a tad bit old school on purpose. I like it. What do you think Wasim? Mark
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      Mark, the theme can look old school or new, its fine, as long as it works with your target audiance, and you achive the prupose of yoru website, i dont see any harm in it.
  4. Arron Dain says:
    Wow, what a great post. There have been many times when I left a site within a few seconds all because of poor layout and a terrible nav system. Great content is very important, but if your readers can't see the content through the other junk, or they cant find the next artical because of a nav system that is hard to use - then that content kinda goes to waste. Thank you for the awesome post Wasim.
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      I know how you feel, I guess we've all experienced that, that's why a clear navigation plays a big part in navigating your customers to where you want them to go.
  5. Fran Aslam the Onlinewriter says:
    Hi Wasim Good post about ranking your own site. Internet is always changing and therefore you need to keep changing with it to get all the traffic and strategies for your PR. Fran A
  6. Clark Leighton says:
    Thanks for the insights! I appreciated the article and the comments. It's easy to get caught up in what you think is easy and forget to observe how someone else might interact with the navigation. I'm pretty new to the blog world and found this info helpful.
  7. Kavya Hari says:
    Accessibility should be most important in the blog , then quality content would be needed in the blog post :)
  8. teatree says:
    One thing I would add is, get feedback from regular people (friends, family and others who just use the internet normally and are not marketers). The amount of times I built a website that I thought was wonderful, only for users to say "but where's... " It's very easy to focus on the complicated stuff and ignore what should be obvious
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      Yes getting feedback from general friends, family and public, that don't spend all their time in front of the net, can help in getting good constructive feedback.
  9. Henway says:
    I think usability is extremely important. The best SEO in the world isn't gonna do you much good if ppl find it hard to use and leave after just 2 seconds
  10. Brittany Rubinstein says:
    Very clear points you have here. You have to remember that all of these aspects work together to create a great website. Even forgetting just one can ruin your user experience.
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      True, it's all about giving your users a good experience, so that they spread the word, and keep returning.
  11. Jamie Fairbairn says:
    I totally agree with all the points in your post Wasim. One of the ways I've found to address points 1, 2 and 3 is to post a link to your website on forums. Many forums have a section specifically for asking other people's opinions on your website. I did this exercise recently myself and it brought up some really great ideas which I've since implemented on my blog.
  12. Wakesurf James says:
    Is bounce rate an issue? I maintain a blog and post, almost daily. Many of those posts are a component in a series. For example I might document building a wakesurf board and there will be 20 posts in that series. The VAST majority of my readers follow me everyday and so...read the current post only and my bounce rate is high!
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      What this means is that they are just reading that one article (e.g., the article of that day), and not reading other posts on your blog. So you are getting visitors, but they are just viewing that one page, try to maximise and get them to explore your site. Try either linking to other articles within your post, or at the bottom have a "other suggest articles" or look into structuring your overall blog layout, by having top articles section or recent articles, something along these lines, try experiment and see if this helps.
  13. Wasim Ismail says:
    Thanks I understand your point, as well as writing good quality content it's also as important that your visitors get the most out of your site. Your site can rank well in search results, but when visitors come to your site, and you cannot convert them or give them the information that they are looking for, they can easily divert elsewhere. At the same time writing GOOD QAULITY content is extremely important on both aspects from search engines and also from users. Thanks for the additional point :)
  14. ZK says:
    Proper and perfect navigation can easily decrease your bounce rate.So while drafting your website just think in which manner or in which pattern you would like to see as a visitor.
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      True ZK, having a good navigation on your site to direct your visitors to appropriate pages will surely reduce the bounce rate.
  15. John says:
    Hi Wasim, Brilliant post, i love to follow all the points you mention in this post, this strategy is very simple to follow but still it is very effective to maintain strong online presence Thanks John
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      Thanks John, :) If you can master how your visitors react on your site, and give them what they are looking for, you have solved half the problem. I'm glad you like it
      • John says:
        I think Google Analytics is best tool to understand and analysis visitors behaviour on website, did you tried new version of Google analytics. Are you using any other free tool same as Google analytics ? Thanks John
        • Wasim Ismail says:
          I just use Google Analytics, it gives good in depth information that one needs for tracking the website performance.
  16. Maria Pavel says:
    If you can believe it, i've recently seen a blog with no category block. How's that for navigation? It had really interesting articles and i wanted to read more, but hitting Next on the main page has its limitations :)
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      :) I can imagine, that must have been frustrating.
  17. ZK says:
    In design you should also mention the font style.We saw many website which does not have right font or right font size.So I think font is also important specially when your website is having content ...What do you say ?
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      The main body fonts of the content should be simple and readable by your viewers, where else if your presenting a banner, or image for call of actions, you can try various fonts. Also take into consideration, if you use a font that's not available on your visitors browsers, they will not see it.
    • Michael Aulia says:
      Yeah..took me a while at times when I decided to play around with something else (fonts-wise).. all in all, go back to the most natural and easier to read fonts
  18. Dennis Edell says:
    Excellent tips. I might add that a full evaluation should be done every 3-6 months at the latest.
    • Wasim Ismail says:
      Good Idea, as with time websites can also get out dated, and need updating, as the internet and the online industry in constantly changing and new technologies arriving.
  19. Kyle says:
    I think a lot of your points touch on aspects of the UX that make a site enjoyable, but I feel like with so many great themes for popular CMS like WordPress, Drupel, and Joomla a guide on writing quality content may be a bit more valuable than a basic explaination of UX especially in terms of quality. In relation to the new Quality oriented algorithm update from Google, Panda, I don't think Google is evaluating your Navigation or Design so much as your content and its relevance.