What Grade Does Your Website Get?

September 5, 2009  

So as a designer, I was curious as to what grade my own site will receive and if I designed my site properly. And, yes, I am not ashamed to say that I did not get an A – at least by the SiteReportCard’s website. Am I shocked? NO.

SiteReportCard is a very useful FREE service that helps you identify broken links, website load time analysis, HTML validation, and much more.

My site, and any site that I create, is already built with web standards in mind and is XHTML and CSS validated.

But I wanted to see what this site had to say about mine. So what were my results?

Well, there were 6 warnings, a high load time warning, and several possible misspellings. However, here are what the results indicated:

• the warnings were not completely valid/useful so really not much for me to correct;
• the high load time of 93.40 seconds is misleading as that’s the reported load time for someone using a 28.8K speed modem – and if someone was still using a 28.8K modem, he/she probably would’t even be online;
• and the misspellings included blog(s), online (not sure why their dictionary isn’t updated to include these web 2.0 terms by now), the word plugin, and e-commerce (though there are several ways people spell this word, including “eCommerce” with the capital “C”). It did find a legitimate misspelled word for which I am very grateful!

So what do I give myself overall? An A of course!!

Try using this FREE service on one of the URLs on your site and see what results you get. It’s at least a good start to figuring out how to make your site better.

Oh and if you need help in making some of the corrections for your site, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m around!

About Kesha Brown

Kesha is the Creative Director and Principal Web Designer at her company XD Web Solutions who specializes in helping small businesses and organizations maximize their online presence. Go ahead and follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.