Web Usability Report. Part One
Apr 25th, 2008 by admin
It seems that as the time goes by, many web site owners become more savvy with Internet issues. More and more clients, especially those who invested heavily in the development of the web site, ask us to to evaluate their creation and provide them with detailed web usability report. I consider this a very positive sign and big advantage for us as web analytics company. It is much easier to deal with the decent web site that was evaluated and re-worked according to our specs, than to optimize something that does not create great user experience and is hostile to search engine searches.
Recently I got read several interesting articles on approaches towards web usability evaluation of the sites. I don’t agree with every single view on this matter but still would like to point out the steps that are a must when client hires your company to conduct this type of work.
It is important to start with general review on overall web site navigation, content and design. At this stage we encounter so many regular problems. Usually any medium size web site with a decent amount of pages has its own share of broken internal links, wrong redirects, unexpected jumps to some folders that are located on the fifth level and other stuff. There will also will be either extremely heavy web pages that take forever to download on a visitor’s computer, or short ones that don’t even contain any textual material.
So many times I encounter small business owners that commit web site “suicide”. Their site is basically consists of one page with embedded Flash multi-tasking application. This is when the client get really upset realizing that he really wasted his money on this alleged web development. Especially, he gets nervous when we explain that search engine spiders don’t read Flash and his site needs to be redesigned completely (if not started from scratch).
