First blog entry! WooF!
Alrighty, the standards of web sites will vary based on the purpose of the web site itself. For example, a children’s educational web site will have very different standards as of that from a electronic retail e-commerce web site. It is crucial that upon declaration of what your site is about, you clarify the purpose and investigate what standards are applicable.
Testing standards is visually orientated. It’s what we see and how we interpret it that’ll declare if the content is suitable to the standard of the site. User testing is the way to go for ensuring the standards are met. Designing a checklist for the user tester to compare against is an effective way to manage the tests, as it also contains what needsto be specifically tested.
It doesn’t end here though. Standards cover a lot of aspects of a web site, aspects that will be covered in other tests.
The standard of the web site covers the following:
- CSS and HTML (Coding)(Accessibility)
- Accessibility
- Page render speeds (Speed)(SEO)
- Broken images and links (Content)(Navigation)
- Spelling and Grammar
- Javascripting mistakes (Code)
- Age of the pages (Content)(Navigation)
My focus will be ensuring that the web site conforms to not only the W3C standards, but also to the purpose of the site. With the example above, I’d ensure all the content and features of the site conform to a standard suitable for children in an educational manner. Target audience applies here.
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Resources:
Edward Miller, (2001). Website Mapping.
San Francisco, CA 94107 USA
