Website Build Quality Matters!

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One question we get asked a lot is:

“My website looks good, so why should I worry about the website build quality?”

Now, if you website looks good – that’s great! You have a website that should be engaging and act as a good advertisement for your business and its services. But what good is this website without traffic? This is where the build quality of the website plays a big part – it helps your website get traffic!

A tail of two audiences…

For a website to be successful it needs to support two different audiences at the same time:

  1. The Human Audience – you, me and everybody else who interacts with your website, and,
  2. The Machine Audience – all the crawlers, bots and other programs that access your website to index and interact with the content on your website.

Now a great looking website will just appeal to the human audience, it will do nothing for the machine audience – which is a shame as it’s the machine audience that indexes the website and get’s you your search ranking so that you show up when people do searches. In other words it’s quite possible to have a great looking website and have zero visitors; if you don’t care for your machine audience.

Checking for the Machine Audience

This is where the online Website Checker comes in and helps you. It has been designed to look at a website both from the human and machine audience perspectives. It’s performs over 150 different checks, covering areas like:

  • Performance – a fast website is good for search engines as well as people.
  • SEO – is the website constructed to support being well indexed by search engines?
  • Security – can the site be easily hacked?
  • Mobile – does the site look good on smartphones & tablets?
  • SEM – does it support Paid for advertising (AdWords).
  • Accessibility – Easy to use across a variety of devices.

It’s important to note that a lot of the areas equally benefit both the human and machine audiences, for instance a fast website results in better search rankings (speed is a ranking factor), whereas for people speed of loading is a major factor in churn. Typically, 47% of people expect your website to be loaded in under two seconds, see this article for more information, the Website Checker will help you achieve this. SEO also helps people ‘see’ what your website contains, as well as benefiting search engines in properly indexing your website.

The Website Checker report is quite detailed, but to make it easier to work out what should be done first it produces a set of recommendations right at the top of the report. The idea being you can send a copy of the report to your website developer and instruct them directly on what needs fixing. Then once the work is done, you can run another report and see if they have actually fixed the problem.

Note: We have found that the size or age of a website is no determinate as to how well it has been put together. It really depends on the degree of expertise applied in the creating the website and if it has been actively maintained and updated.

Remember, if you make your website appeal to both the human and machine audiences, both will benefit. You will have a fast, efficient website that indexes well in the search engines – maximising your potential to gain traffic and online business.

If you would like to give the Website Checker a go, click here .

 

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Keith

Director at Aykira Pty Ltd
Keith is a founder of Aykira & has over 18 years experience with everything Internet. From eCommerce to security, mobile to maps; large or small. PhD in Info Systems, member Australian & British Computer Society's, ex Yahoo. Architect/Engineer/Innovator.