Prepared by IC Name Here 19 January 2011 For Customer Name Here WSI IM is a trademark of Research and Management Corporation (RAM). © 2011 RAM. All rights reserved. Internet Marketing Company. Understanding this report This report is broken down into 3 main sections: Section 1: Summary This gives you a brief overview of how good or bad the website is as a whole. This includes a screenshot of the website, five summary scores (Overall, Accessibility, Content, Marketing and Technology), a bullet point summary of key good and bad points, and recommendations for what issues need addressing in order of importance. Summary Scores Screenshot Scores out of 10 for different aspects of your A picture of the homepage of this website. site. They summarise the results of all 35 tests. Good/bad points A summary of the most important points. You’ll usually need to read the corresponding test results to fully understand these. Recommendations Actions to take to improve your site, in order of priority. A handy to do list. Section 2: Individual tests Each test has a score out of 10, and a portion of text explaining what the results mean. Recommendations and extra detail may follow below, depending on the test. Score Out of 10, it summarises how good or bad the results for this test Summary A summary of what the results mean. are. Recommendations Where possible, some text about how to improve the results is included. Sometimes these are technical and best suited for web professionals. Tests are listed in descending order of score, with the worse results first. Generally you should pay more attention to negative points first, as these will improve your site the most. A few tests don’t have a score – these will instead have a purple information symbol and appear at the end of the report. These tests tell you useful information, but don’t score you for it because it’s not appropriate (for example, the Contact Details test tells you what contact details you have on your website, so you can see if certain things are missing, for example a postal address). Section 3: Appendixes If you want to understand the Summary Scores more (Overall, Accessibility, Content, Marketing and Technology) this section will help you. Summary Score Summary This also appears on your summary page at the start of A brief explanation of what this Summary Score your report. means. Breakdown Each individual test that contributed to the Summary Score. The weight is also given – this means how much the individual test affects the Summary Score. If a result is very bad, an extra penalty may be applied. Each Summary Score is calculated by combining individual tests and applying a weighting to each one. For example, Marketing is based on scores for Search Placement, Freshness, Incoming Links, Content Keywords and more. Where a particular element is very important, additional penalties may be applied to the summary score. These are explained and listed in the Appendix. Glossary Wherever possible we avoid jargon. But the report does use more well-known specialist terms like ‘keywords’. We realise that not everyone will know all the terminology, so here’s a quick glossary. Accessibility How accessible a website is to everyone – in particular users with any form of disability (e.g. dyslexia, colour blindness) or using less common means of accessing a website, such as a mobile phone. Accessible websites can be used by more users, are a legal requirement in many countries and are widely considered best practice. Analytics A type of software for analysing the behaviour of visitors to a website. WebScan looks for modern Analytics tools which deliver full detail on user experience (such as Clicktracks, WebTrends, or Google Analytics). Using a proper Analytics tool is essential for any website if you wish to understand how people are using it. Alternative text It is possible for non-text content in a web page to have an ‘alternative text’ equivalent. For example, an image or video might have a text description. Although this text is invisible to the vast majority of web users, it is important: alternative text can be seen by search engines such as Google, and images and video can’t. Similarly, users with disabilities may be unable to see images, and rely on alternative text to understand this content. See also Accessibility. Broken link A link which when clicked upon doesn’t do what you would expect – most often, an error appears like ‘Unable to find this page’. Cookies A type of technology used to track users visiting a website. Although sometimes essential (especially for e-commerce sites and login areas), some users will block cookies and search engines can’t use them, so it’s important that websites work without them. CSS CSS is an extremely common form of technology used to format webpages. Using CSS makes web pages smaller, faster, better optimised for search engines and more accessible. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Domain name The part of a web address that you buy to hold a website, e.g. www.google.com. All other pages in your website are just extensions of the domain name, e.g. www.google.com/news Flash A very common technology used to display animations on a website. Almost all animation on the web is powered by Flash, including the majority of video. Flash is not displayed correctly by smart phones like the iPhone, and Flash comes in different versions which not all computers support. So it is important to know how much of the website uses Flash and whether it uses it responsibly. Incoming link A link into your website, from another website. These are often valuable – see SEO. Keywords Something that someone would search for in a search engine. It is common practice to consider what keywords a website should score highly for (e.g. ‘car insurance’) and then optimise a website for them. Metadata / Meta-tags Literally data about data – usually information about a web page. Metadata is important because webpages can provide information about themselves which search engines use to understand that page. For example, the text that appears in Google underneath the name for your website. Outgoing link A link from your website to another website. Popup A window which opens automatically when you view a page. These are widely considered annoying and over 70% of web users block them. Printability How well web pages appear when printed. It’s possible to write web pages so that they appear different when printed – it’s best practice to use this technique to fit the printed page, and hide unnecessary parts of the page (such as menus). Many users print web pages to pass them to other people, especially for meetings or recommendations. Readability How easy content is to read and understand. Search Engine A website used to search the internet – most commonly Google, Bing, and Yahoo. SEO Search Engine Optimisation. The process of improving a website so that it appears higher in search engine results. Correctly used, SEO is usually the best way of increasing quality visits to a website. Spiderability Whether search engines can see the content in this website. The process of exploring a website for content is known as ‘spidering’. Spiderability is essential for websites that wish to score highly in search engines. Stylesheets See CSS. URL A web address, e.g. www.google.com. Stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URL chopping Chopping the end off a URL to try to go ‘up one level’ in a website. For example, chopping www.example.com/news/article1 to www.example.com/news. Users and search engines do this, yet some sites crash or reveal sensitive information when they do. URL format How well formatted the URLs in a website are - in particular whether humans could understand or memorise them. Bad URLs are harder to publicise and sometimes even ignored by search engines – see SEO. W3C Compliance W3C is the standards body for the internet, and they define how web pages should be built for maximum compatibility. W3C Compliance is an evaluation of how well a website fits these standards. A high score means the website was built to a good standard. Viewing your report online Why view online? It’s much easier to explore an online report than a large paper document. You can explore your report in more detail, see extra explanations and use the help if you need to. You can also search through results and export individual results into popular file formats, such as Microsoft Word ® and Adobe PDF®. You can even send a link to the online report to a client or colleague. If you have multiple reports, you can also compare two side-by-side online, or compare many sites in a Dashboard. What you need 1 Your WebScan username and password Internet connection A compatible web browser1 Almost any computer running Windows XP, Vista or Mac OS X will be fine. Supported browsers include: Internet Explorer 7 or 8, Firefox, Safari and Opera on Windows, Mac or Linux. What to do Go to http://webscan.wsipowered.com/ (Note that this web address does not include a “www.” at the beginning). Login using your username and password. You should see a list of websites which have been tested for you. Click on a website to view a report on it. How to explore your report To explore the Summary Scores of a report (e.g. Overall, Accessibility, Content), click on ‘More’ next to each Summary Score. To see results from an individual test, use the left menu. It allows you to easily switch between tests. How to print or export your report Click on either the Print, Export to PDF or Export to Word button. Select which section(s) of the report you wish to print or export. In most cases, you can leave the defaults as they are. Click OK and follow any on-screen instructions. How to compare 2 reports side-by-side To do this, you need at least 2 reports to compare. You can compare 2 different websites, or the same website at 2 different times. View the report for one of the websites as normal. Click the Compare button. Start to type in the name of the website you wish to compare with. As you type, matching websites will be displayed. Click on the desired website. You can then select from the dropdown list which exact date you wish to compare with (if the website was tested on different dates). Click OK. To stop comparing two websites side by side, click the Compare button and then Clear.