I was looking at an article the other day which was pointing out useful website design tools and came across something I used long long long ago when they first started, Website Grader.
Website Grader has been around for a while so it was interesting for me to see how it had changed in the last year or two.
I tell you what – it’s a lot more advanced than it used to be.
When I stumbled on them in what I think was late 2007 they weren’t very advanced in what statistics they were reporting on. In fact it was like pretty much every website grading tool on the market at the time – pretty lame.
Now, they’ve beefed up the statistics, culled the useless ones, and left us with something that is actually quite insightful and useful.
Testing Website Grader
As a demo I decided to run it on this site and then went on to run it on pretty much all my sites and some client sites as well, revealing some interesting data.
They send you a personalised copy of your report – here’s mine for Code My Own Road.
Features
Some of the statistics include:
- Readability
- A summary of your on page SEO
- Domain information
- Your MOZ rank
- Off page SEO (inbound links and competition analysis)
- Conversion info (if it found an RSS feed or newsletter email conversion form)
- A social media summary
… and loads more. You can even compare your grading and data to competitors. In fact it’s a great tool for scoping out competition when entering a new niche!
Mindful Use
While it’s important NOT to put too much faith in a tool like this, I do think that every once in a while it’s good to pause and reflect and check some of the obvious things.
Make sure you’re not making silly mistakes – for me it’s not having a newsletter subscription option (something I’m looking into) – and get a rough idea of how you’re going compared to competing websites.
I’m usually pretty critical when it comes to judging the usefulness of tools such as these, so I was actually pleasantly surprised to see some groups out there are making real measurable progress in providing useful stats for webmasters like us.
More Resources
I’ll be adding this to the resources page. Find more interesting and useful tools there.
I use tools like this on a regular basis, as you say, very helpful to make sure you’re not making any silly mistakes.
Dave Doolin´s last article: Consistency – A 7th Characteristic of Trust Building (Everyone can do this)
I’d have to say semi-regular for me – simply because I find if I spend too much time looking at this stuff it takes me away from important things.
My report cards always used to say “easily distracted”