Site Under Construction!

In the current climate of the credit crunch and with so much positive press around the buoyancy of the internet, more organizations are looking to the World Wide Web to maintain or increase sales. What many are doing is realizing that their sites are perhaps not as good as they could be and are investing in updating or de-developing them. For others, the process of site maintenance is an ongoing activity with a dedicated team.

So with all of this development going on, it would be fair to assume that there must be a lot of testing as well? I would suggest that the answer is no. For some reason, when people are requesting development of web sites, it is believed that they are best placed to ensure that it is fit for purpose.

This is a bad assumption for several reasons:
1. Finding the time to thoroughly test the website is difficult to achieve. The people responsible for the new website are normally being asked to do this as one of many tasks.
2. The attention to detail required to check the entire site, is high and demands a certain type of individual. The tester has this mindset and is used to applying methodical and meticulous tests, whereas the business person may not be.
3. This may be the first time that the business person has been asked to test anything. Testers are used to testing websites, this is something that they do on a regular basis and this enables them to make better use of their time, homing in on problem areas.
4. Business resources normally check things positively, making sure that situations that are expected are dealt with. The tester introduces negative testing. Checking to understand that the site can handle abnormal activity, that which deviates from the norm.

So what is happening? Companies are employing development agencies and placing themselves in their care. They are relying on the development agency to ensure the quality of the site. The business are doing their best to make sure that the site is okay and are paying for development when they think it is finished.

In a normal IT project, the business relies on the testers to ensure that the application is to a certain standard before it comes anywhere near to them and this step is not being performed. Three problems result from a lack of in-built quality: The first is that the development agency is paid for the delivery, even though problems may not manifest until later. The second is that the development agency is held in low esteem once they have been found to have under-delivered. The third is that the organization requesting the website, find that they have a tool which does not meet their needs and therefore requires further investment to put the problems right.

The involvement of testing as part of the process ensures that the site is performing as was requested. It can be used as a means of safeguarding the payment, ensuring that the development agency have fully delivered prior to releasing funds. It also protects the development agency from losing their customer due to poor satisfaction.

The design is truly the prerogative of the business and only they can say if the look of the site is what they wanted to achieve. Other than this it should be placed in the hands of the experts. Remember that better quality, means customers are happier to use the site, more likely to find what you have to offer and therefore an increase in sales should result. I have said in many places that a poor web experience results in lost sales and that users are highly likely to leave your site for one offering a better experience or easier to find items.

Ranking Your Web Success

When talking to a wide group of web owners, it becomes apparent that whilst they are concerned about the quality of their website, they are equally interested in some of the other aspects of their web presence.

Different people have different ways of measuring a web sites success, but there are some which are universally accepted. I have yet to find a site that is not recognised by Google for instance. Google offer a means of looking at web sites in order to determine their importance to the internet community. It does this by a series of complex algorithms and the results are provided on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. I would suggest that an average Google Page Rank is between 4 and 6. Alexa Ranking looks at the popularity of a website in comparison to all others. A score of under 100,000 is particularly good and one that is running above 10,000,000 bad.

A general rule of thumb is that as those sites with a high Google Page Rank will also have a high Alexa Rank, although at times this does not follow precisely. Once you have established your own rankings, you can then start looking at the competition. We all know who our closest competitors are, those that we would like to think we are better than and perhaps those that we would aspire to match. From a web perspective comparing each of the organisations Google and Alexa rankings against those of your own organisation’s, gives a good indication of your standing in the group.

Use of such competitor analysis helps organisations recognise that work is required, or that they are ahead of the game and need to maintain momentum. Whatever your line of business, the importance of being found quickly on the web is high. More traffic comes to your site and you can then reflect on what is happening to traffic when it arrives.

When checking a web site, make sure that you do not forget to consider the simpler aspects. Your rankings are an excellent gauge on how you are performing.

TCL India ensure that information of this nature is included as part of our Web Check results. These are quality indicators, although of a different type. Supply us with your list of competitors and we will also include the results for them in your report.

W3C 29 out of 30 Sites Fail

W3C makes the following statement:

“W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines. Since 1994, W3C has published more than 110 such standards, called W3C Recommendations. W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software, and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web. In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as “Web interoperability.” By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to avoid market fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation.”

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/

So how come so many sites are not following these standards. As a piece of work recently, we looked at 30 random web sites and checked them for W3C compliance. We found that only 1 of the 30 passed the check.

What was perhaps more surprising, was that around one third of the sites that were reviewed, had an error count of less than 30. Would it not be reasonable to suspect that an organisation which is so close to compliance to the foremost standards on the web, would go the extra mile and achieve compliance? I must therefore assume that these organisations are unaware of the fact that they are nearly W3C compliant and are developing their websites in ignorance, relying solely upon the development agencies to abide by their own standards, some of which may happen to coincide with W3C.

So what are the problems that organisations that are not W3C compliant going to face? Foremost, the transfer of the development from one agency to another is going to become more complex. Rather than being able to transfer code that is well written and understood by many, the site owner may become tied to a certain development agency, as they are the only ones that understand the code. The cost of changing a website completely is often far too expensive to consider, resulting in a reliance on one particular supplier.

Secondly, these standards once employed facilitate more effective and efficient crawling by web robots, who gather the information that search engines use. This means that poorly written code, translates to hard work for robots, poor understanding by search engines, lowering chances of the site being identified and reducing traffic to the site. Reduced traffic means reduced sales.

Thirdly, for those that are using the site from a disabled perspective, the tools that they use to try and surf the web, are hindered by poor code, making it more difficult to look at the site. We have already discussed elsewhere in the blog the importance of making web usage easy, yet here we find another example of poor user experience. Some organisations have even had lawsuits filed due to them failing to meet their obligations to disabled users.

Lastly, the site is less likely to transfer to other platforms used to surf the web, such as mobile phones and handheld devices. This is again restricting the use of the site, barring individuals that do not come on line using the mainly prescribed mechanisms.

My last point on W3C for the moment, so as not to be taken as a complete hypocrite, is that when I checked a couple of blogs, including my own, the volume of errors was in the hundreds. I am not yet certain whether this is something that can be remedied, but I can assure you that we will be looking at it and will let you know the results.

In summary, get your site W3C checked. Know that you are giving all users the best possible chance to use your site, have a good experience and possibly even generate a sale or two.

WebCheck - More Information

We thought we would give some more information on the Web Check process as an addendum to the previous Introduction posting.

http://tcl-india.blogspot.com/2008/05/tcl-india-introduce-web-check.html

Websites are critical to all of us and with 15% of all retail trade in the UK conducted on line and whilst the credit crunch is hitting retail elsewhere, the effectiveness of the web ensures that it remains buoyant.

Some organizations are happy to rely on automated tools to assess their website/s, but can they really experience the web site as their designers intended? Programs are as intelligent as the programmer and whilst they may be very good, recognising that the layout of a page is jarring on the eye is going to be hard to achieve to say the least. Using the web is to some extent an emotional experience and this needs people to experience it. Most of us use the internet to shop to some extent, be that a book from Amazon or shopping from Sainsbury or Tesco. As a high street shopper, the ability to move from one store to another takes time and effort. The ability to ask a shop assistant for help is simple. On the internet it is not so easy. We hit problems and change site at the click of a button - opportunity missed! Zero time and effort and zero tolerance for problems or challenges that make shopping harder to achieve.

WebCheck is performed by professional testers, familiar with web testing, experienced in understanding the needs of the user and most of all…human. We don’t ignore the capabilities of web crawlers as this would be foolhardy: They do have a place and we augment our manual process with them.

As an output from each of our WebChecks we provide a certificate showing the quality percentage achieved. Further, a detailed report of our findings, including defects, observations and recommendations is provided. We also look at aspects such as Google and Alexa rankings, understanding the importance of your site to the internet community and the likelihood that people will come to your site. If desired, we can provide comparisons between your site and others, from a ranking perspective or user experience. We are not looking to develop, host or design your site. We are testers and want to help clients understand their sites problems and capabilities.

If you would like a quotation for the Webcheck service on your website, please e-mail us using the contact details on the left of the page.