Evaluating your site involves trying to work out whether or not it is a good site, so that you can remedy any problems.
There are different ways to evaluate your site - usability testing, discussed last time, is a form of evaluation. In this lesson we concentrated on one technique, the use of checklists.
Comprehensive evaluation
A comprehensive evaluation checklist tries to ensure that your site is good in each of various areas of site design. It is useful but can be difficult in two ways:
- coming up with an appropriate checklist is not always easy
- some of the questions on the list can be relatively theoretical and do not have obvious answers
Spotting problems
A checklist for spotting problems lists common Web mistakes. You can use the checklist to make sure that your site doesn't make any of those mistakes. This is very useful and is normally quick and easy (since such lists are available on the Web) but:
- a website that doesn't make any common mistakes is still not necessarily a good website
- if you have made an unusual mistake, it will not be caught
Combining the two
If you have time you could use a combined checklist, with both types of question (aimed at spotting common mistakes, and aimed at highlighting things you should have achieved) which avoids some of the drawbacks.
Completing checklists
It is best if other people (preferably several other people) complete the checklists about your site, because they will not have the in-depth knowledge and bias about the site that you have.
