The guys at Silktide have an automated tool, called Sitescore, for analyzing a website. It scores your website on aspects like popularity, standards compliance, accessibility, user experience, and appeal. A single tool that looks at all the aspects of your website - that’s worth a look!
This blog has scored 7.7, here’s how:
It is as easy as typing your website’s URL and choosing the number of pages you (by default 5) you want scanned. As you can see this blog has faired poorly in accessibility, infact, making it probably unlawful in Britain. Additionally it also finds the faults and recommends the site be redesign to meet W3C standards. This blog is currently using the Hemingway 0.1 Alpha theme for Wordpress.com and has a couple of mistakes which invalidates the XHTML. This is the foremost reason for such a low score in accessibility. In rest of the elements though, it scores fairly well - most of it is because of the goodness of Wordpress.
Along with automatic quantification of marketing, design, accessibility, experience, user rating, it also gathers votes from is users to judge visual appeal of the website. It also provides the details of the analysis, by providing their logic behind the calculations. It uses popularity on Google and incoming links to rate the marketing aspect. It considers things like response time of the website, size of the web page, average number of images, use of fonts, use of forms, login area, availability of feed and search and features like about and contact information for assessing usability of the web site. It also recommends usage of CSS as against tables for layout of the website. This entire list is available if tick the checkbox saying “Show technical results” just below the textbox for your website URL.
If qualified it provides you HTML for displaying a button on your website with the site’s live score. Currently it is being displayed as:
It might not be very accurate, but it definitely helps in assessing your website. Unlike other services, it offers an entire bouquet of standards compliance, best parctices for design, usability and accessibility analysis. I hope the tool is continuously refined and bettered to incoporate the latest standards and best practices. Give it a try.
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Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.
April 6th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Its interesting for a site, but do you think it helps for a blogger too? Isnt technorati plus a look at the stats and main page enuf?
April 6th, 2006 at 11:26 pm
Hi Sukhi,
It might be important for some blogs, maybe like corporate blogs.
However, I liked the service, because it looked at almost all the aspects together - usability, accessibility, standards compliance, seo, performance, user experience. It is a good test to take.
April 8th, 2006 at 7:26 am
[...] Having said this, Wordpress already has pretty good performance. As written earlier, Sitescore gives good marks to performance which is all because of Wordpress. But more enhancements are not harmful , considering Wordpress is being used in innovative ways all around. [...]