Every website is created with an objective in mind. There are thousands of websites on the Internet. If one is not competitive with regards to the quality of our website we could just get lost among the zillions of sites. A website's web visibility can become so poor that it can trickle down to almost zero traffic. Therefore care must be taken to properly design and maintain the website well, right from the beginning. And at every stage of evolution of the website it should be tested and assessed for performance. Website assessment is an art and only good experience makes one an expert in website assessment.
What are the different features that we assess in a website? It is best to start with asking questions that will give accurate indformation and help us in better website assessment. Here are some of the important assessment questions:
- Is it easy to navigate the website?
- Is the website enough useful for the business
- Is the web site appealing to the eye?
- How good is the content of the website?
- Do the web pages load soon?
- Is the content relevant to your target audience?
- Can the visitors easily contact the site authorities?
- Is everything functional? (forms /animation etc)
- Is the website search friendly?
- Is it easy to find information on the site?
- Does the site appear on the top listings on a SERP?
- Is the site ready to face other online competition?
- Is the site built according to the SE /W3C guidelines?
- What is the conversion rate for the site?
If satisfactory answers are not received for any of the above questions one must work to improve the situation. The process starts with a thorough assessment by professionals. Problem areas have to be first identified before recommendations can be made. This is usually done using many different types of online tools and web analytics like Google analytics. Only when all the different parameters like site's performance like reports of phone leads, unique visitors, conversion ratios, search engine referral trends and details on incoming traffic etc have been looked into can we be sure that the initial web assessment is complete. Successive assessments are made periodically after the recommendations have been implemented.
