What makes a great website?
The internet today is flooded with people who call themselves 'Web Designers', sadly the vast majority of these people are self-taught amateurs who may have the ability to make a website look great but it may end up being the electronic equivalent of a beat-up old car with a shiny paint job. Looks great but doesnt work as well as it could. The problem is, how can the average person tell if a website is 'Great!' or just 'Great looking'?
The first thing that you should do is look at your website in a web browser other than your default one, You can download the most popular browsers using the links below.
You may find that your website looks brilliant on one browser and terrible or even unusable in another, many web designers try to justify this by claiming that everyone uses Internet Explorer anyway, however if you take a look at the latest statistics from the World Wide Web Consortium (the website of the man who invented the internet) you will see that this is just not true, even if it were there are several different versions of Internet Explorer which all perform differently.
Most companies will provide you with a website which may look good and perform in the way you want, but it may not conform to important web standards and more importantly may not conform to accessibility laws, this would mean that if your website is a commercial site (i.e. a site for a company) then you could actually be sued. If that isnt enough to worry you then if you combine a lack of web standards and a lack of accessibility awareness in your website (which is a lot more common than you might think) then you are potentially making your site UNUSABLE by up to 50% of your users.
If you dont believe that professional webdesign companies would or even could do such a thing, then please, don't take our word for it! We invite you to take a look for yourself. There are two completely independent tools on the internet which can help you do this:
http://validator.w3.org / - this one will display one of two pages, if it comes up green then all is well... if comes up red then stay clear of the people who made it as they don't know what they are doing. Most web designers worth their salt know about these checks and often you will find that the site is valid, however you will be amazed at how many sites will come up red.
http://wave.webaim.org/ This website will check for accessibility errors, if it detects any errors then steer clear of the people who made the site - one other thing to note if the site fails this checker then it is actually illegal and its possible that they could be sued. There are a worryingly large number of web designers who don't even know that this is law and do not even bother getting their sites up to the required standards
Presumably, by now you have checked a few websites and discovered the shocking state of affairs in the world of 'professional' web design, we are sure that it was an eye-opening experience for you, however fear not as all of our websites pass all of the tests with flying colours.
If you already have a website and are worried on its performance in the real world then you can get a free, no-obligation 'health check' with us. Click here for more information.