Once you have examined a web designer’s portfolio, looked for clues about their design style and understanding of usability, you can take a deeper look at their work by peeking under the hood.
Obviously, just as a non-mechanic would struggle to gauge how well an auto shop had repaired an engine, it’s going to be difficult for most marketers and business owners to tell a lot about a site beyond its appearance. For that reason, you’ll probably have to be content to use some simple tools to point you in the right direction.
Ideally, you would want to know how well a sample website had been optimized for search engines (SEO), how secure it was, whether it featured a content management system, was easy to maintain and update, and so on. Unfortunately, these issues are a bit too technical to dig into in this short post (although we may revisit them in a future series), but one thing you can quickly and easily determine is whether their sites conform to W3C standards or not.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with W3C, check out our post from a couple of months back that explains the concept, or simply know that it’s a way of measuring how well a site is coded for access and usability for different platforms and devices. Checking any website’s score is easy: just type or copy and paste the address in the form field at: validator.w3.org and hit “Check.” One or two errors/warnings here or there is not a major issue, but when you get a report with hundreds or errors, beware.
Another quick way to tell whether a site really works well, instead of just being a pretty sample, is checking whether it loads as it should in other browsers. Good web design companies will make sure that their sites work in all the major browsers (Internet Explorer v6 or 7 and upwards, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari), and on both Windows and Mac systems.
You don’t have to use sophisticated tools to get a sense of whether a web design team is doing quality work behind the scenes – you just have to know what you’re looking for, where to find it, and why the answers matter.
If television and movies have taught us anything about history, it's that the old American West was a place "without law." Drinking, gambling, and gun fights in the street were the symptoms of towns that seemed to have sprung up from nothing – the result of a mad gold rush that attracted entrepreneurial types from all over the world.
While the idea of saloons full of marshals, cowboys, and horse thieves might be overplayed for entertainment value, the concept of places being built from nothing actually gives us an interesting parallel to the development of the online business community. In the first days, there were sparse settlers setting up shops in camps at any URL they could find. Over time, though, areas have become crowded, complex communities have formed, and yes, laws are coming.
In this case, we aren't talking about political laws, but accepted standards of the way sites should be designed and arranged. The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), an international group of designers and consultants, is moving towards a set of universal guidelines that would serve as a kind of guide to best practices in layout and coding.
This might seem like a bit of a reach, given that the online community can be ferociously independent, but it actually represents change in a good way.
Just as laws and standards eventually came as a relief to the American West – few people enjoyed the prospect of being shot in Cheyenne or Abilene – uniform standards on the web will make pages safer and more accessible for everyone. By creating a handful of common tools, they mean that pages from all parts of the world will become easier to find and use by anyone, regardless of their hardware, operating system, or local provider.
Why should you care? Because usability is a close cousin of profitability; the more people who can view and navigate your site, the more potential buyers you can reach effectively. As more and more communities go online, and next-generation mobile devices spread like wildfire, WC3 standards are going to help smart marketers expand their reach.
The "law" might not be coming to the web, but standards are. Making your site work within them might not be mandatory, but it is going to be a good business decision.
