Broken links irritate viewers.  

 

Many site have broken links.  Even sites with the best development in the world can have broken links.  The reason is simple, perhaps a link to a page at Ducks Unlimited, is added.  It is tested and everything is great. Unfortunately Ducks Unlimited was just finishing a major re-design of their site and the article that used to be tieyourown.html is now articles.php?id=9380758 or something like that and the link on your site is now broken. 

 

In a year about thirty percent of the sites disappear and about twenty percent of the remaining ones are reorganized.  For commercial and government sites the numbers disappearing are not so much, but many get reorganized top justify budgets.  Good links go bad.  Every web designer knows this. 

 

The best sites in the world scan daily, or more frequently, for broken links, because they know that in spite of all care and testing, links get broken as sites change or fold.

 

How often do you have the site scanned for broken links?  If you are a government or business on the Cape the answer is probaby , "Never", and if ppart of your job is to manage the site, you are not doing your job.  Then  there is a very good chance that your site has broken links that are driving away viewers. 

 

Our site audit includes a broken link scan and analysis. 

 

There are reasons other than lack of quality education for webbies for the number of spelling errors on many sites.  Among them are:

• When creating a page the designer has to worry about layout, presentation, odd site editor commands, and the impact on the viewer as well as content, grammar and spelling.  It requires a great deal more attention than entering text into a word processor.  Attention attenutated gives more errors.
  
  
• Many site editing tools do not have spell checkers.  That is rapidly changing but the change is nowhere near complete.  Joomla, which we are using, has no pell [sic] checker.
  
  
• People do not take ten seconds to report spelling errors.  Perhaps they would, instead of just snarling at the web designer, if they better appreciated the previous two points.
  

It is difficult to get spelling errors out of web sites.  In our site audit we place each page in a word processor to check for spelling errors.

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Incorrect Imaging

Three rules that many amateur web designers do not follow:

1. Use GIFs or PNGs for line drawings, text and solid color images, and use JPGs for real world pictures.
   
   
2. Make the sizes of images 20k to 80k so people with modems can use them unless there are special circumstances:
   
   
1. Internal hign speed sites can use larger images.
2. If you do not care about the modem users, larger images may be used.
3. A prarticular need requires high resolution.
   
   
3. Use thumbnails for pages that link to images one at a time.  If possible allow the user to select image sizes depending on their download speed.
   

It is quite amazing how many web designers harm their sites by not knowing or following these simple rules.

If it is advisable, our site anaysis will suggest methods for better image support.

Malformed or badly registered secure purchasing

if the site has low grade encryption, an expired certificate, or  an invalid certificate it is exposes the users to incresaed risk of very nasty things such as stolen credit card information, or site spoofing.

That is bad enough, but as such is a clear indication of not meeting the legal standards of taking due care, if a customer is damaged and the site owner can be sued and lose their gluteaus maximus.

This extreme liability is right and good as flawed secure pages are a clear and complete indication of completely incompetent site design or support.

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Design improvements 

Outright design errors are rare.  It takes an extraordinarily limited designer to have, ass we have seen, three different links on a menu going to one page, or a "Contact Us" link that goes to a product descriptio page.  However they do exist and should be checked for once in awhile.

 

More often our experience with web software can suggest a better way of reaching out to your viewers. Depending on the goals for your site, and staff available to check it, a site can better impact its viewers with a blog, a guest book, a forum, or organized mailings (listserv programs).  For this analysis a brief statement of the goals of the site is useful. 

 

A note on  'druthers (I'd Rathers) of what the site might do can be useful.

 

And any information you have about hit counts and demographics,  Google's Analytics is a very useful servie and we can set up your site to acquire excellent hit and usage iformation and analyses.