Does Your Website Stink?

Here at Spring Above Marketing, not a day goes by where we don't see at least one site which we think really stinks. So how would we tell if your website stinks?

Aesthetics

Does your website look good? Does it portray your company as a professional, respectable company? Or maybe your website portrays you as a hole-in-the-wall amateur company or, worse yet, a company with no image?

Aesthetics is perhaps the most obvious way in which a website can stink. Your company's brand is important, and this cannot be stressed enough! It is one of the very few things that will set you apart from the competition. If your brand does not follow through to your website, it detracts from brand recognition, and your visitors may think they have reached the wrong destination. Image goes far on the web, and it is a proven fact.

Cody, our guru of all things design, has a way of seeing if your website stinks:

• Do the text colors contrast to the background enough to accommodate for people with visual impairments?
• Do the images on the site reflect the content?
• Is the brand image clearly stated and accurately displayed?
• Is there appropriate kerning and line spacing in the content?
• Is the site design clear of clutter?

If you answered no to any of these questions, then perhaps a rotten smell emanates from your website. Stray away from fluctuating trends in design. If your site is simple and clear, it will withstand the test of time.

Usability

How easy is it for a user to navigate your website, find what they're looking for, add items to carts, checkout, and/or contact you if they need to?

Usability can often be terribly overlooked. If people have a hard time achieving their purpose on your website, they will try somewhere else. A user viewing your page for the first time should know within seconds: what they need to do and where they need to go.

We often come across clunky, over complicated, hard-to-use navigation. The usability stinks when users are hovering over more then one menu before choosing, and backtracking to get to a different page. Good navigation is quick and intuitive. Users ought to get exactly what they expect with a minimum number of clicks. Too many options in a navigation menu can be just as bad, if not worse than, too few. Testing and examining navigational paths in Google Analytics are your best tools here.

Colors are also important for usability. We have to remember the color blind users who may perceive some colors differently. Contrasting colors are very important for the readability of a website. If the contrast between the font color and the background is not significant enough, it may be too difficult for users to read.

Accessibility

Accessibility is one issue that very few websites address, and its importance cannot be understated.

Can your website be accessed by people of all abilities and disabilities? It is important to know that there are a significant number of people on the web with visual disabilities, ranging from poor vision to color blindness, as well as complete blindness.

Is your website accessible from mobile phones and slow connections? What about users browsing without a mouse?

A quick way to check page accessibility while using Firefox is to browse the top-left menu and select View > Page Style > No Style. Stripping away the style will show you the very base of your website. If your website looks the same with the style turned off or at least has a similar structure, then your accessibility is stinking. Ideally, the bare-bones, no-style view of your website should look nothing like your website normally does. It should actually look like a word document in structure. You should be able to tell what everything is and why it is there with a nice structure of headers and semantic mark-up.

It is also important that all text on your website, from your main content, to headers, to navigation, is actually text, NOT images. Text in an image stinks, and is one of the biggest tip-offs to a site built horribly wrong.

An added benefit is that when your website is maximized for accessibility, it is also optimized for search engines!

Flash

Adobe Flash is a tool for creating and displaying animation and videos on the web. When used correctly, Flash can be very useful, but when used wrong, it can completely ruin the experience of your website's visitors and destroy your ranking in search engines.

Flash is quite easy to identify: if something is moving, fading, or otherwise dynamic on your website, it is either Flash or JavaScript. To determine which, simply right click on it. If the right click menu says "About Adobe Flash" or something similar, then you know it is Flash.

There are some things which should never be Flash:

• Your Entire Site
• Navigation
• Headers
• Text Content
• Any sort of introduction screen

Flash can be beneficial when used tastefully and selectively. Games, animations, and minor functions are good uses of Flash and can enhance a users experience when done correctly. Just remember that even without Flash, you can still have an incredibly dynamic website that is both usable and accessible. While Flash has its purposes, top to bottom website building is not one of them.

JavaScript

JavaScript is programmed logic that is executed by your browser when you visit a website. It typically defines the behavior of that website.

JavaScript problems are seen all the time, mostly because some developers forget to account for users who may not have JavaScript support on their browser. Sometimes we see JavaScript being used for navigation in such a way that when JavaScript is disabled, the navigation will not function. Not only is this a huge problem for anyone without JavaScript, but search engines will also not be unable to find the content on your website. Developers should remember to use JavaScript in a way which allows search engines to see the navigation.

WYSIWYG Editors

WYSIWYG (pronounced wizzywig) stands for a What You See Is What You Get. A WYSIWYG editor is a program which helps you create a website with little or no specialized web development knowledge. A common, well-known program which uses WYSIWYG function is Adobe Dreamweaver. While WYSIWYGs are typically not a problem in and of themselves, developers using these tools typically build websites that have many or all of the stinking issues mentioned in the sections above. Although they are a very appealing choice for both business owners and amateur developers, they often end up producing an amateur website.

Now you know the basic essentials of how a website can be evaluated, and what is necessary to make great improvements. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The topics we have covered have hundreds if not thousands of articles, books, and discussions pertaining to each of them, and we encourage aspiring developers to do their own research. You don't need to know everything, but a solid understanding of the fundamentals of web development makes the difference, and a thirst for knowledge puts you ahead of the pack.

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