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How to review a website
Recently I engaged on a "personal" project where I review websites for Botswana government. I have done only two reviews so far but below I summarise some of the main factors which I think are fundamental for an objective review of any website, including yours of course. Content
I guess most people who will be reading this article would already know popular saying that, "Content is King" and "graphics are the queen." Does the website have any useful content at all or it's just a set of links to other contents in other websites? Is the site's content related? Is there sufficient content in the site, a website with just a couple of pages sometimes is not even worth your time to even review it. Markup
Does the markup validate? Verify this using W3C's CSS and HTML Validation Tool. Validate links, use W3C's Link Checker Tool or any other tool you can lay your hands upon. Check use of invalid character set or characters which are not compatible with the declared encoding. Layout
You would be surprised as to how many people still use tables for layout. So as a reviewer you need to check whether that is the case and advice accordingly. Is the layout clean and consistent between different pages? Is it themed? Is it appropriate for the genre or niche of the website, you don't want an online shop that is laid out as if it is a blog? Typography
Badly typeset pages are usually a turn off; the website might be rich in content but that content will not be of any use if it strains people who want to read it. A reviewer needs to identify whether there has been correct use of font-families, line height, headings, use of contrasting colors to highlight important points in the content. Is the content chunked using for instance paragraphs and lists? Navigation
Navigation is a fundamental aspect of any website regardless of the purpose of that particular website. So when reviewing, it's necessary to look at how the site's navigation has been laid out, is it logical? Are the different content pages interlinked or there is no interlinking at all? Interlinking of pages is a very important aspect especially when Search Engine BOT are crawling the site because they can follow links from one page to the other and it shows relationship between the content pages. Updates
How regular are the updates for the website under review? You can usually obtain this information by looking at the dates the articles/content in the website were posted. However, if such information is not available, you can always look at the HTTP Last Modified By Date header; for this I use a Firefox Addon called Live HTTP Headers. Of course there are other issues that you can look at including SEO, cross browser compatibility etc. These may be subject for the next intel I post ;-)
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ministry of trade and industry - botswana
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