Hew to check web site quality & find common errors

There are several factors you may want to consider to check web site quality and improve the viewing experience for those who visit your site. Some of the most common are listed below:

TECHNICAL ISSUES

Site speed: This can be easy to judge simply by visiting your web site yourself. Open your browser and go to your main page then click refresh. How long did the page take to load? If the answer is more than 2-3 seconds that may be too long. Users can quickly loose patience with slow sites especially if they're on a slow connection. If your loading speed is too high you might want to consider removing some of the images from each page or resizing them. You could also break your content up into multiple pages with links between them.

Broken links: These can reflect badly on your site. Have you ever seen a 404 error message? Did it annoy you? That's not something you want your viewers to experience on your site. Tools like DeepTrawl or the W3 link checking service (search for w3 link check) can find the broken links in your site and allow you to fix them. You should run a link check regularly to make sure new broken links haven't appeared.

Spelling: It sounds obvious but in larger sites built using multiple technologies spelling fast becomes an issue. You need to make sure all your spelling is in the right version of your target language (think about the differences between US & UK English). You also need to make sure the spelling is correct in content which comes from sources like databases and scripts.

STYLE ISSUES

Layout: This is one of the more difficult site issues to fix. A good start is to use valid xhtml (DeepTrawl can check this or the w3 have a free validator you can use). It's also important to take stylistic elements out of your html and put them into css. The <font> tag is a definite no-no. Using css and xhtml mean your site is more likely to be rendered properly by different web browsers.

Graphics: The graphics you choose to use say a lot about your site. Your viewers should be pleased to see the graphics you choose to use instead of wincing when they see them. A great investment is to do some searching and spend a few dollars to get some stylish graphics from somewhere like iStockphoto.com

Do it the easy way: A lot of style issues can be cured by starting with a good quality website template. You might want to check out the ones over at PixelMill.

DeepTrawl is available for Windows & Mac OSX.

Which bits of this can DeepTrawl help with?

DeepTrawl can check web site quality in a lot of ways and show you exactly what you need to fix. For example from the above list our software can do all of the following in one easy to use product:

- Check each html file downloads fast enough (you may still want to do the refresh test describes above to make sure your pages download fast enough in your browser with all the images etc.);

- Check your entire site for broken links with one click. DeepTrawl scans your whole site and shows you exactly where each broken link is both in our built in html editor and highlighted in your browser.

- Check all the spelling in every page, whether the page came conventional html files, a server side script, database or a mixture of these technologies.

- Check web site pages validate as xhtml, the most stringent standard available.

Hew to check web site quality & find common errors

Which bits of this can DeepTrawl help with?

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