Is My Web Site Ineffective? Yes?
What Do I Do Now?
Intro | Checklist 1 | Checklist 2 | What do I do now?
The answer to this question is the same one as the joke about the guy who goes to the doctor’s office and says “It hurts when I raise my arm.” The doctor replies, “Don’t raise your arm.”
When I’m training or giving a speech, I tell the audience, “The most important thing you can do to improve your web site is eliminate unnecessary design items.”
Everything you’ve checked isn’t necessary. Eliminate these mistakes and you’re on your way to an improved web site.
Elimnation isn’t the whole solution. If you eliminated the mistakes on certain web sites, there wouldn’t be much left.
If you didn’t check your sites against the online programs in the introduction, here they are again. Use them as a start to fix your site.
After You Complete the Checklists
While validating/checking your site against the following tools won’t guarantee your site isn’t ineffective, you won’t have to answer certain questions with a check mark.
Check your page’s HTML at http://validator.w3.org. Fix your mistakes — or as many as you can.
Check your page’s/site’s CSS at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. Fix your mistakes — or as many as you can.
Check your links at http://validator.w3.org/checklink. Fix your mistakes.
Check your images for accessibility issues at http://juicystudio.com/services/image.php. Fix your mistakes.
Check your content for readability at http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php. Make sure your content is not too “smart” for your audience.
Check to see if your text and background colors have sufficient contrast at http://juicystudio.com/services/colourcontrast.php. Fix your colors.
Check to see if your CSS’s text and background colors have sufficient contrast at http://www.accesskeys.org/tools/color-contrast.html. Fix your colors.
Check to see how your page looks to the colorblind at http://www.q42.nl/demos/colorblindnesssimulator/colors.html
Check your site on http://www.instantposition.com for the first 5 keywords you use to describe your site.
Check your page’s content accessibility using Cynthia Says at http://www.cynthiasays.com/
Check your page’s performance and web page speed at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Check that your page/site looks the same in over 80 different browser combinations at BrowserCam