Website reviews should be used as a learning experience for developers, both new and experienced. What is even nicer, is that you can easily review other peoples’ websites without needing to see their source code (unless it is a dynamic driven website) and this allows anyone to do a website review.
Some common reasons you might be asked to do a website review, other than for you to learn from other people’s experience include:
- Review a potential client’s site, and let them know what should be changed,
- Review the work of a coworker to ensure it is correct/good,
- Review a 3rd party vendor, who did work for your company to ensure it meets the specified requirements,
- and even Review your own work to ensure you are both correct and where you might need to make improvements.
Each of these situations are different, however, each hold several things true. Personally, I have found that most developers have a hard time reviewing their own work. They are either too hard on themselves, or too easy. If you cannot effectively review your own work, you might want to find someone who you can switch roles with to review their work, while you review theirs.
When I first go to review a website, I quickly go through the whole website, or as much of it as I can, to get an initial feeling on how easy the website is to use, and how visually appealing it is, or isn’t. After that, I complete a slower, more detailed analysis of the website.
Depending upon what I’ve been asked to review, I will typically check for things like:
- Review of the Design – How appealing is the website to view/use? While all design is subjective, there are defined rules that can drastically help or hinder how the website is perceived.
- Review of the User Friendliness – Based upon what the average person who will be viewing the website, will they be able to do what is necessary? If you don’t know who the average website user is, you will need to develop a user persona for the website.
- Can users find what they might be looking for?
- Can they easily read the content, both from a design perspective, and a language perspective? If you are targeting high schoolers, writing at a professional level needing multiple years of college education will not help them.
- Does it need special plugins/browsers to use (video/audio players, Java Applets, etc.)? – Most websites now won’t require something like that, but a few years ago, that was different.
- Site Download Speed and Responsiveness – Nice looking websites that take a long time to download are not going to perform well. People generally start looking for a way to leave if a website takes more than 2 to 3 seconds to display.
- Site Functionality – Does the site do what the user of the site wants to be able to do? This may vary from what the owner of the website wants to be able to do, so having a user persona will be immensely helpful for your review, and you may need to create this yourself if the existing owner has not created one for you.
- Search Engine Optimization – Is the website locally optimized for Search Engines? The process of Search Engine Optimization is fairly complex, however, there are some things which you can easily control on the website itself.
- Website Security – This can usually only be done fully effectively if you have back end access to verify server security settings.
There are some aspects of what I use that you can use for your site review.
However, they should still be done well,with thoughtfulness and consideration. When you create a review, you should do these things:
- Build a persona for the website. Let the reader know why you picked that persona, and how the website, and the proposed changes, will help that mythical buyer want to spend more time and/or money on the website.
- Remember who your report’s audience is. It is the business owner, manager, technical lead, or fellow team member? Also remember who you are writing to may need to be reflected in how you write it.
- Make sure you don’t “insult” your reader. Know that they may love it because their spouse/kid/friend/family member love it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. Making suggestions is one thing, insulting them is another. Assume the person you are writing to created it, and it’s their pride and joy. How do you tell someone their baby is ugly? (Hint: very carefully.)
- If you don’t like something, suggest a fix for it. Saying something is wrong without proposing a fix is called whining. Offer solutions, it helps to stay employed.
- Don’t forget that every website has something good about it – find it. It can help break the bad news.
- Think about the business. i.e. telling someone to remove all of their ads so the site isn’t cluttered, doesn’t help if that’s how they pay for the site. Figure out how to make it work better for them. Generally websites need to either run ads to pay for their hosting, have a benefactor, or be designed to sell people something either directly or indirectly.
If you follow these guidelines, it will make it easier to do a website review.
Performing a Website Review was originally found on Access 2 Learn
