Client manual from CF.Digital: how to analyze a website on your own

So, let's take a look at the concept of web usability today.

Websites implemented according to the rules of web usability are better perceived by users, have a low bounce rate and a good indicator of time spent on the site. Thanks to web usability, a product becomes commercially successful: it receives requests and makes sales. In other words, web usability is the harmony of all aspects of your resource. To achieve harmony, every detail in the list of 6 points must be worked out:

• Interface;
• Design;
• Textual content;
• Graphic content;
• SEO friendly;
• Website loading speed;

The cocktail of these 6 points sets the reaction and forms the impression of the visitor when entering the site. To understand what's wrong, you need to look at each of the ingredients carefully and carefully.

Interface.

If you compare a website to a person, this is the basis, in fact, the skeleton of your usability. When designing the interface, you think about the location of functional elements in relation to each other, their logic of operation, the relationship between sections and subsections that are designed to perform conversion actions.

In order to analyze how convenient it is for your potential client to use the site, forget that you know your product like the back of your hand. Imagine yourself as a user, go through the sections, and answer a series of questions:

• Is there a mobile or adaptive version of the website?
• Is it easy to navigate between sections?
• Are the sorts, if any, convenient for the average consumer who is not versed in the subject matter?
• Is there no deep nesting of sections?

Are there enough calls to action, if any? Help from an online assistant or chat bot, a call to leave a phone number, a quick purchase, etc.

Analyze your competitors' websites to identify your weaknesses and strengths and make a list of modernizations that need to be made to your site.

For a more in-depth analysis of usability, there are a number of online resources with free and paid features that allow you to identify the weaknesses of your interface. Here are the most popular and easy-to-use ones:

1. Usabilityhub.com
2. Usabilla.com

Design.

This is your face, and other people always like attractive faces. In this case, you don't need any online tools to assess the quality of the design. After all, if the design does not meet modern trends, it needs to be updated!

Text and graphic content.

This is your makeup. You must admit that sometimes makeup can be very colorful. Any website, even the most convenient and beautiful one, can be ruined by textual content and graphic images.

Analyze the texts on your website. Are they comprehensive? Are they not presented in the form of a “canvas” and diluted with formatting? Users won't read long texts that are presented in the form of a story. Present the information with theses, formatting in the form of quotes, a numbered list, and dilute it with infographics. Make them visually interesting.

As practice shows, the greatest damage is done by images. The images you use should be beautiful, clear, taken by a professional photographer in a single style, or purchased from a photo bank.

Look at the photos you use: do they tell the story of your product? Do they sell it and your company? Do they evoke the emotion you need? If not, get yourself a package on one of the popular stock photo sites and delight your customers with bright and high-quality images. The most popular photobanks:

1. Shutterstock.com
2. Depositphotos.com
3. Fotolia.com

SEO friendly and website loading speed

This is the state of your body: how athletic it is. You can live without sport, but its presence will change your shape and health. SEO friendly means basic website optimization or the availability of the necessary parameters for this optimization and minimization of errors. These are not all the requirements for a website to become as SEO friendly as possible, but the main ones are:

1. Availability of a human-readable URL, i.e. a clear page address. In this case, page addresses should be free of any incomprehensible symbols: “=?:%” and numbers.

The correct URL is: http://address_site/about/
Incorrect URL: http://address_site/1234rr?ff=%kfkfm/

2. The presence of headings H1-H6 on the pages. H1 is the title of the page, section, or article itself. The rest of the H2-H6 tags are additional and are used for less important blocks in the design or for formatting text data, but they must also be present.
You can check the presence of tags on the website: https://sitechecker.pro/ru/адреса_сайту in the section “H1-H6 check”.
3. The presence of Title and Description. You can see the title of an HTML document in the browser tab when your page is open, as well as when you share a page on a social network. Title goes into the post title, Description - into the description.
You can check for tags on this website: https://sitechecker.pro/ru/address_site, section “Title check” and “Description check”.
4. The presence of the robot.txt file. This file should contain pages and directories that should not be indexed by search engines, as well as a link to the sitemap. You can check the presence of the file using the link https: //site_address/robot.txt
5. Availability of the sitemap.xml file. The sitemap must be implemented according to the requirements of Google. You can check the availability of the file at https: //site_address/sitemap.xml
6. Absence of errors, or a minimized number of errors (up to 10) that are generated by HTML and CSS validators. This is the quality and cleanliness of your design layout, i.e. the HTML version of the design that users see.

HTML validation check: https://validator.w3.org/nu/
CSS validation check: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

7. Speed of loading of page from data of Page Speed Insights must be in a green belt for a desktop version and mobile/adaptive version of web-site. That indexes were in a green belt, service will prompt in what divisions and with what files it is necessary to conduct works.
8. Presence of favicon - simply beautifully :-)

If you are interested by the deeper, detailed and professional analysis of web usability, you must appeal to the digital agency that will prepare answers for all your questions or will pass to the stage of development of new resource, if the current frankly became antiquated.

Ideal combination of interface, design, content and images, what are loaded instantly - or is it not paradise in a network the internet?

Yulian Kobylinska, Head of New York office of CF.Digital

Material is published Sostav.ua