How are websites rated?
SiteScore rates all websites on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest).
Scores are broken down into 5 categories:
Marketing
How well marketed, and popular the
website is. Is the website well linked to? Does it feature highly in
key search engines, for relevant terms?
Design
How well designed and built the website is.
We test for various industry standard practices, and whether they were
used correctly on the website (for example: use of frames, style
sheets, redirections etc)
Accessibility
How accessible the website is,
particularly to those with disabilities. Recent UK and US government
legislation makes this a legal requirement in many countries, which we
test against.
Experience
How satisfying the website is likely to
be. We test various things, such as the speed of your website, the
amount of variation between webpages, the number of clicks required to
navigate between one page and another.
User
Average user feedback, gathered from people rating the websites in our list.
Users are asked to rate how a website looks, on a scale of 1-10. This
is the only non-automatic test, and as a result it can take some time
for a website to gather enough votes to score here.
What does #69 mean?
To give you a sense of the quality of compassdesigns.net, here are some similar scores:
| 59 | www.mozilla.com | 9.4 |
| 62 | www.webstandards.org | 9.3 |
| 63 | www.universityofcalifornia.edu | 9.3 |
| 68 | www.bbc.co.uk | 9.3 |
| 69 | www.compassdesigns.net | 9.3 |
| 79 | www.ibm.com | 9.3 |
| 80 | www.cssplay.co.uk | 9.3 |
| 86 | news.bbc.co.uk | 9.3 |
| 87 | www.nytimes.com/pages/books | 9.3 |
| 116 | www.htmldog.com | 9.3 |
| 132 | www.myspace.com | 9.2 |
| 133 | www.webcredible.co.uk | 9.2 |
| 160 | www.macwarehouse.co.uk | 9.2 |
| 161 | www.msn.com | 9.2 |
| 164 | www.whitehouse.gov | 9.2 |
Now, this is flattering, but its important not to loose sight of what an automatic tool such as this can and connot do. It’s great for quickly getting feedback on some site quality factors but should not be the end all and be all of the goal for your website.
At the end of the day, your site is about your viewers. What is best for them is best for your site.