10 Checkpoints To Be Aware Of By Web Designer
I would like to present some useful analytics services, validation tools and monitoring services you, as web designer especially, should be aware of. Some “standard” tools – such as W3C Validators – are skipped; instead I’ve tried to focus on tools you probably don’t know that much about.
1. Check Your Site Ranks
This is probably the most prominent analytics tool in this overview, delivers a detailed report on dozens of various design-related aspects. Every single key point is evaluated and rated according to its performance on the scale from 1 to 10. Among other things Sitescore analyzes the quality of incoming and outgoing links, keyword density, page titles, plagiarism, popularity rank, the usage of popups and the effectiveness of site’s structure. Sitescore also grades the printability, readability, spiderability and usability of the page as well as spelling and W3C compliance.
Another tool with similar approach. It measures the relative importance and visibility of a page, the potential strength and ability to rank in the search engines and presents data on popularity, links & mentions of the page across the Web. The tool is designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a site/page’s relative importance and visibility.
Similar to Sitescore, Webagogo tests the quality of web sites and presents the results as reports in a brief overview. The tool performs markup and style analysis, accessibility tests, usability tests, speed benchmark tests and calculates SEO effectiveness. Not really spectacular, but it’s nice to have some important checkpoints ready to hand. You have to be the site owner and have access to an e-mail address on the site’s domain.
Blog Juice estimates blog’s value upon the approximate number of Bloglines subscribers, Alexa rank, the ranking assigned by Technorati and the number of inbound links.
2. Use the power of Usability Tests
This web-tool offers an effective website task management system you, your colleagues and your testers can use to exchange information and discuss some critical issues related to the page design.
3. Track your growth permanently
It’s primary task is to observe trends and developments related to your web site. The tool collects information about incoming links from Google, Yahoo and MSN as well as social bookmarks which point to your site and presents them in Flash-based graphs. Thus you can observe directly, how your site is growing, which tendencies occur and what changes might be important to increase your popularity.
4. Prepare your site for search engines
This SEO Analysis Tool is to help you analyze and measure the ranking potential of your web pages. It doesn’t only analyze the Meta Tags of your pages, rather it tries to use the same spider technology as the search engines spiders them self.
Nikita The Spider is a service that validates and link checks your entire Web site and reports on what she finds. All you have to do is give Nikita your home page URL and she’ll take it from there. Nikita’s link checker will find broken images, broken hyperlinks (both internal and external), and references to missing documents. The tool uses the same validation parser engine as the W3C Validator and checks for HTTP headers that often contain mistakes.
5. Identify your weak spots and fight against them
Website Grader calculates the marketing effectiveness of your web-pages based upon the keyword popularity, link popularity, page structure, traffic ranking, readability level and search results in Google. With this tool you can compare the quality of your web site with the quality of your competitors, partners or colleagues and thus generate a detailed competitive analysis which can give you some ideas on what you might be willing to improve. The tool also calculates the amount of diggs and articles from your site submitted on Digg.com.
Get competitive metrics for every site on the web – powered by the largest pool of online consumer behavior data in the industry.
6. Ensure the Best Performance
mon.itor.us provides free real-time personalized Ajax dashboard interface, checks server performance and availability, generates uptime and availability reports, tracks visitors, checks system resources, and alerts its users in case abnormalities are detected.
7. Ensure the best quality of your content
Orangoo Spell Check / SpellCheck.net
A perfect site is based upon the perfect content. However, there is nothing more annoying than mistakes and typos – particularly in the opening paragraph. To make sure you’ve brought your article in an optimal form, you should make use of an online spellchecker.
8. Know what your users are doing
Clicky offers web analytics in 2.0 style. The service is supposed to give bloggers a more personal understanding of their visitors. The tool offers a highly customizable, clean and simple user interface. Apart from “traditional” data about the visitors of your page, Clicky stores the details about every visitor, including every action they made on web site (page views, file downloads, outbound links).
9. Explore your demographics – know who your users are
It presents the demographics of web sites as well as the estimated monthly unique visitors, similar sites and the profile of a typical visitor of the site. Unfortunately, the results are sometimes quite unusable, because there are simply too many sites quantcast doesn’t know yet.
10. Know where you stand
A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more!
It help you find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics.
Check everything you ever wanted to check
You can also use time-consuming tools in order to check some specific aspects you are interested in. The following services provide references to all checkers you could ever possibly think of.
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