by Alex Hinds

Created on: July 03, 2009

Before starting to assess a website design you need first to have thought through the objectives of the website in order to have a framework with which to assess the site. If this initial thought and planning process has not been undertaken it is quite likely your site design will be poor without you even realising it, possibly for some time. It is essential to have a clear understanding of who you are targeting with the site, what you hope they will get from it and how they will interact with it. How will you know if your site is successful? What criteria are you going to assess it on? If your site is a business venture, how and why do you expect visitors to be converted into customers?

Once you have a clear understanding of the websites objectives, you can test it against relevant criteria based on these objectives. For instance, if you know you will need to regularly edit certain content you can test the procedure for doing this by the people you expect will actually doing the maintenance. Knowing how you expect your visitors to interact with your site will allow you to consider if your design actually facilitates and encourages the interaction you want. A simple example is the number of clicks required to get to a desired outcome; generally the fewer the better. Does your site help your visitors get to the information they want quickly? If your site has a search facility is it producing relevant results, or frustrating your visitors? Will a visitor to your site leave happy and satisfied, or disgruntled and frustrated?

Final usability testing should be undertaken by a relevant group of people representing your target audience, who should be both observed while using the site and surveyed and/or interviewed about their impressions and experience of the site. Is the site intuitive to use to the kind of people you want to visit and, in the case of a business site, convert into customers? Observing this group and using their feedback should hopefully confirm if you've got it right, bar a bit of to be expected tweaking, or need to rethink before launch!

With a site that is live it is well worth installing the Google Analytics scripts, even if only for a temporary period, to get detailed information on how visitors to your site are behaving, from the time they spend on the site, the pages they visit and if they are returning visitors. This can be very valuable in helping to redesign site elements to improve its performance and make the most from the traffic it is attracting.

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