From what I can tell, my site gets a fairly good score from Silktide, which appears to be a web development firm based out of England. Some of the areas I got marked down on aren’t a surprise at all (W3C validation, for instance, is failing miserably right now, something I need to pay attention to rather soon), but I did get a laugh out of the one section that I was rated as ‘Very Poor’:
Amount of text A page was found to contain a very large amount of text. Users very rarely choose to read large, continous blocks of text, and these pages require time to download and scroll through for relevant content. Recommendations: Break larger pages up into several smaller pages, and consider restructuring content to make navigating it easier.
Yeah…I get it. I talk a lot. This isn’t exactly news, especially if you’ve been following my site for any length of time. Good for a laugh, though.
Now to take a look at those validation errors and see if I can’t bump my score up above a 7.8…
(via A Crank’s Progress)
Update: With some work tweaking templates and a mix of simple fixes (some missing </div> tags) and not-quite-so-simple fixes (tracking down all the unescaped ampersands), I’ve managed to push my way up to an 8.3 rating. While I still rate a Very Poor for Amount of text, I’m now Good on Size of pages, Features, and Speed, and Excellent on Popularity ranking, Popularity on Google, British legal requirements, Use of fonts, Use of forms, Use of Flash, Use of frames, Table-based layout, Use of headings, Use of style-sheets, Use of Interactive Elements, No of links, No of images, Links to, Use of page titles, Refresh redirects, Basic HTML design, Use of advertising keywords, and Use of audio. Amusingly (and quite accurately, in my opinion) for many of those categories — Flash, tables, redirects, audio — it’s because I don’t use them that I got the ‘excellent’ rating.
I think that’s all I’m going to worry about.
“A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” by Darin, Bobby from the album Legendary Bobby Darin, The (2004, 3:02).
Wow, that’s a lot of writing! “…require time to download…” I’m sure glad I have a broadband connection!
You audience likes reading large blocks of text.
This Validation service is designed for Corporate websites which are designed to target Joe SixPack.
Don’t change a thing (except for the W3C Validation)
hrm … I got a 7.6 on nitallica.org. I got a “poor” on the first section, which said “This website appears to be in violation of the British Disability Discrimination Act” … says it’s not w3c validated (WTF!?)
I clicked on the more info part and the complaints were that I don’t use the “alt” tag on images.
grumbles
Guess I’ll be fixing that …
I took their little quiz and they were shocked SHOCKED!!! I TELL YOU!!! at my Google page ranking. (I didn’t even know I had one.) The tone of the note feel somewhere between a British lord finding you taking a leather strap to his mule and a British lord finding you chasing his mule around with your pants down around your ankles.
I think, that there is no reason to look at score. Ussualy I use this service just to find mistakes ant get some advices, what I need to change. Ofcourse I don’t do blindly what they say.