There are a number of ways to look at a website. As we’ve discussed before, you have at least two main audiences, both looking at your website quite differently. The first and foremost are the people who you hope will like what you have to say and how you say it, and consequently want to do business with you. The other are the bots….not the Cyberdyne robots of Terminator fame, but the web robots utilized by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines that look at your site from a different perspective than we humans do.
Search engine robots don’t much care what color schemes you use or that a picture on your website features a beautiful woman, a child, or an old man. Search engine robots care about content and the relevancy of your content to your site. They care about color contrasts (to keep from hiding text), they care about site speed, and they care about votes from other relevant sites (inbound links). Other than asking your mother-in-law or your next door neighbor what they thinks of your website, how can you get an objective look at what you are doing right and what you might be doing wrong? One way, would be to hire us. A much more affordable option (FREE) would be to enter your website URL into the website grader put together by the people at Hubspot. Website grader takes a look at a number of important factors regarding yours or your competitors websites and comes up with a grade, anywhere from 1 at the low end to 100 at the high end. I’ve yet to see any website score a 100…not to say they aren’t out there.
Microsoft.com scores an 82. Lenscrafters.com scores a 77. Amazon.com ranks a 97. dbadesigns.com (our business site) scores a 95. While the results of the test and the suggestions this site makes should not be the end-all, be-all, there are things to be studied and learned to help you build, tweak and improve your site. Spend a few minutes looking over your site, the websites of your competitors, and the websites of those businesses you admire at www.websitegrader.com
