Getting a Usability and Design Analysis to Improve Your Website

Website got you down? Looking for that solve all fix to get it rolling as planned? If you are asking yourself, or searching the web for a way to fix your site, know that it’s probably not going to be just one thing to really get it moving as planned. You really need to step back, you need to clearly define your site to yourself, and then move from there. As my little banner says, “Analyze, Streamline, Convert”.

Define Your Site

There are all sorts of free online test you can do to help improve your site, but the best thing you can do is to truly define your site to yourself. What’s the primary objective? Does it have more than one objective? Are you accomplishing any of the sites objectives well? Does it even have an objective besides getting tons of visitors?

Before you go out testing your site, repairing code, making new logos, stuff like that, know what and why you are doing it. If you do not have a clear objective for your site other than traffic, you will get no traffic, at least any that is worth anything.

Getting Professional Feedback

So you may be asking why should I spend $79.95 on getting BWI’s Web Usability and Design Analysis? The most important reason is the fact that it’s someone else’s eyes that will be determining the quality of your site. This is extremely critical because the odds are, you most likely want someone besides yourself to visit your website, and not everyone sees the world the way you do.

Way, way, way too often websites get built without one simple review from another person. Are you sure your site works fine? I’ve seen plenty of order forms that don’t work, and you know the webmaster want those forms to work. If your sites business plan is focused on making a profit, getting a heuristic analysis like this is essential. It’s more than a critical bashing of form and fashion, though this often occurs. It can find failure in your primary site message, and what’s more important than that?

Another reason you should get professional advice is because there is time tested reasoning, practical testing, and “in the know” experience that can quickly point out serious errors that may not be easily recognized and occurring on your site right now.

Getting Feedback From Others is Good, Kind Of

Getting feedback from others is great, and is something I value most. Unfortunately feedback from others is often difficult to develop a plan from. Comments like “It’s great” or “It’s OK” doesn’t mean much. Hundreds of “It’s Great” would be nice, but it still doesn’t tell you, as a webmaster, how to improve a site. Positive feedback may even decrease your sales. If your goal is to sell something, and all you do is cater to the positive feedback that, say for example, your site has great resources. Your focus might move toward pushing new visitors onto those resources. An initial plan to sell and make money has now been put on the back burner to accommodate general visitor feedback. Oops!

Why BWI’s Analysis is Essential for a New Webmaster

Having a heuristic analysis is critical to the things that matter most to you, getting visitors to accomplish your sites primary objective. An analysis is structured, it identifies known industry problems for visitors, and in the case of Best Web Image’s analysis, give reasoning for all of it’s findings.

Best Web Image’s Web Usability and Design Analysis can almost be used as a basic website standard for new and old webmasters. An actual standard for websites goes way beyond the analysis, but to give you an example what I mean here is the first item of business, Title of Site. It looks at the length, the keyword quality, and the “does it even make sense” quality. It would even identify if the title would make a poor bookmark. The first item of the analysis could substantially improve your return visitor rate, search engine positioning, usability, and credibility. ROI could be accomplished with this one bit of information. The analysis continues this way covering basic items that most webmasters simply don’t pay attention to, and they really should. Another example would be to see if your site has a contact page. It does? Good, well the analysis doesn’t stop there. It reports the quality of the contact page, ways it could be improved, and reasoning on how a poor contact page could effect your sales.

What Does The Analysis Cover?

The entire analysis, thirty five checks in all, offer extremely valuable checks for any webmasters. It looks at: navigation, site credibility, basic design concepts, forms, and the effectiveness of those forms. Many of the items on the list are expected by most web surfers, but as webmasters we often forget what all of those items are. The analysis checks for site inconsistencies, accessibility features or lack of, and its development for search engines. Delete all the answers from an analysis and a webmaster could use this repeatedly for all of their sites.

Two additional key factors for the analysis is the “Why It Matters” for every item looked at, and the conclusion of findings. It’s one thing to have someone tell you why you should change, it has a little more value though when there is substantial reasoning why. The conclusion of the analysis is a “What I would do first if this were my site” comment.

Your analysis might reveal several things that could use some improvement, and fixing them all at once might not be practical. Having knowledge of what should be fixed first reflects the level of importance, and will help a new webmaster in their decisions on what, if any, changes should be made.

To Get The Analysis

To get the thirty-five point analysis you can go here: Web Usability and Design Analysis – Expectations should be set on “High”.

Regardless of experience levels, webmasters are repeatedly impressed by this really, low cost report.