Website analysis

This week at PushON the team had the brilliant idea for me to start recording what work I’ve completed so far. I started by signing onto here and exploring all the different layouts and designs it has to offer. After choosing one that I liked the look of I got cracking and started jotting down all of the things I’ve been up to so far. So from now on my blogs will be up to date and I will be sure to record my progress after each week. There will also be some informative bits of writing about any new ‘crazes’ that are knocking about the info comms community. Hopefully I’ll be educating myself and you guys at the same time!

This week I was also introduced to a very valuable feature which PushON offers (free of charge) to any company who owns a website. The Website Analysis, also know as a website M.O.T., is a tool which looks at a websites features and individual elements throughout the site to see what needs to be done to optimise the website performance. Improving various aspects of a website can improve its ranking within search engines. This is important, if a search engine can’t find you because of the way your sight is designed, people probably cant either thus resulting in your company losing potential customers.

This whole feature was new to me, so with the help of Mark Mayne (another one of PushON’s hard workers) I started analysing my first website.

Here are some examples:

• As well as CSS, JavaScript needs to be kept in an external folder as well.

• You shouldn't use images as links because Google can’t read these.

• Your sitemap should be a XML sitemap as this shows search engines that links are present. This is useful because ideally you want all your links to be indexed.

• It’s important to always have a personalised ‘custom 404 page’. If you don’t and a user enters incorrect characters when using your web page they will be taken to a standard 404 page, instead of a page explaining what's gone wrong. This could cause confusion/annoyance and the user might leave your site.

• You should avoid using frames. They’re an old fashioned way of designing web pages but also because not everyone’s software can read frames so some people could have problems navigating around your site- use CSS instead.

• Make sure your URL doesn't contain numbers- use keywords. Ensure your page title is under 60 characters. PushON have an excellent tool which can check this for you. Amongst other nifty tools they also offer a String Length Tool which shows the length of your meta tags as you type them and a Header Checker which makes sure your pages are being redirected easily.
  

I left feeling like I'd learnt a huge amount and was really looking forward to the coming weeks.