Nonprofit Expressions

Website Report Cards
(for website owners)

Have you ever gone to a website and said “I wish my website looked like this!”

What is it about a website that either draws you in, or makes want to click the “back” button? There are no black and white rules of web design. Everyone has a different opinion on style, a different method of navigating, and a different level of web experience.

But the fact is that there is some criteria that the majority of the World Wide Web can agree makes a website “bad” or “good.”

In our experience doing website re-designs (taking an old site and making it better) it is important that you (as a website owner) know what to look for in your website, and know what to ask your web designer! We have decided that a report card method would be the most helpful.

How we decided on the criteria:

1. First Impressions
Is the website pleasing the the eye? While this is the most subjective of the four criteria, based on our own experience and expertise, there IS such a thing as bad design,

In design school they teach us that there are four basic principals of good design. They include: proximity, alignment, repetition and contrast.

Another question to ask is: Do the colors and images reflect the organization’s branding and purpose?

2. Usability
In grading usability, we follow the concepts set out by people like Steve Krug (web usability consultant whose clients include Apple, AOL, Netscape and many others). Usability is the visitor’s ability to understand, comprehend and interact with the website without frustration or anxiety.

Can you tell what the site’s main purpose is upon first glances? Most websites only have 3 seconds to introduce themselves to a visitor before they click the “back” button.

Is the navigation consistent, easy to understand and highly visible? Is the information flow in such a way that you can find what you are looking for without having to think about it? Does the website accomplish its goal in a functional way? Do the applications work? Is there a newsletter, and is it easy to sign up for?

3. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the amount of traffic a website gets from search engines by using targeted key words.

Does the site have title tags, meta tags, and clean URLs? Does it have semantic information design (such as an h2 tag following an h1 tag)? Does it have descriptive anchor tags?

Although there are only a handful of questions here, SEO is actually a very complex topic that we could talk about for hours. These, however, are the criteria that we are placing in our report cards.

4. Technical Standards
The technical standards are not subjective criteria. These are critical elements used by software engineers in the technical community even beyond the scope of web design.

Does the website have doc type declaration? Is it HTML or XHTML standards compliant? CSS standards compliant? Accessibility standards compliant?

And last, does it have well formed code?
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Now that you understanding our criteria, let me explain our grading methods. First, each of the four criteria will be a separate grade in of itself - like a report card from grade school! Each subject gets its own grade.

Second, we will give the website a pass or failing overall grade. This will tell you if it is still stuck in kindergarten, or has graduated to go to college! (Is it stuck in code from the 90s, or is it up to Web 2.0 standards).

So stay tuned for our Website Report Cards. Our first grade will be given to NewChurches.com.

For a free report card on your website, please contact info@nonprofit-expressions.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 11:33 am and is filed under Best Practices, General, Improving your website, Search Engine Marketing, Standards, Uncategorized, Website Design, Website Report Cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.