Useful Tools for Web Design Evaluation

Basically, an effective web design is described as the one in which users are able to find information in an instance and in a logical way. Therefore, as a web designer, you must be able to know how to evaluate your own designs to see if it delivers quality outputs and effectiveness to users. Take note that there are an array of methods which can help you in evaluating the over-all performance and looks of your website.

Below are some tools that can help you know if your web design will work.

PERFORMANCE TOOLS:
    *      YSlow – this tool is created to examine all the components of your web page, including components dynamically created by using JavaScript. It also measures the performance of the web pages while offering you a few suggestions for improvements.
    *      WebPageTest – a helpful utility that analyzes the page load times while giving you a quick rundown of how well your site is performing based on a number of various criteria.

ANALYTICS TOOLS:
    *      Piwik – this analytics software gives interesting yet detailed reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the language they speak, and all the needed information.

VALIDATION AND COMPATIBILITY TOOLS:
    *      HTML Validator - this validator checks the mark-up validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, and MathML, thus making cross-browser design that much easier. You can also check if your source code is standardized. This tool will work perfectly for all users even though they use different browsers.
    *      CSS Validator – a free validation software created by the W3C that is committed to help Web designers and Web developers check the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This tool is said to be an invaluable ally. It does not only incorrect uses of CSS, but it will also tell you when your CSS poses some risks in terms of usability.

USER FEEDBACK TOOLS:
    *      Five Second Test – is a simple usability test that measures the effectiveness of your user interfaces. It works by flashing up a screen shot of the particular web page for 5 second. After the page is viewed a form appears which has five spaces for the user to simply list the things they remember.
    *      Usabilla – this tool allows you to create your own feedback surveys. You can edit the tests in order to get useful data on how visitors find their layouts.

Use these tools listed above early in your development to ensure you're on the right track, or use it to see how well your existing site stacks up.

Making Sense Of Google Analytics

Getting traffic is definitely the most important thing for any website owner. And understanding how traffic comes and goes is crucial in maximizing the traffic that you get. Thus, web analytics is a must to do for any site operator.

And this is the part where using Google Analytics comes in. But what the heck is it anyway? As the name says, Google Analytics, or GA for short, is a tool for studying web statistics. It is distributed free of charge by Google, either as a stand alone software or integrated into their other web marketing programs.

GA tracks down all visitors coming to the site from various sources and referrers, such as search engines, and compile them. These are then presented to the user as statistical data. Often other types of information is also present in the data, like those coming from pay per click networks and email marketing materials, as well as PDF links. And when integrated with other Google market analysis tools,  such as AdSense, GA will also show data from the areas covered by these.

Because of the large amounts of data that GA present, it can be quite confusing for many first time users. However, once you get the hang of it, it should become much easier. However, there are some items that you need to take note from the very start.

The traffic chart at the top of your GA page is the easiest to notice. It is also the most important, as it gives you a visual overview of your site's traffic. Here, you can adjust the coverage of the chart by simply selecting your desired dates. You can also immediately compare different data sets by choosing the time periods you want to display.

Below the traffic chart graph is the Site Usage section. Here, you will see a breakdown of site traffic into its components. There are six sections in here, three of which provide you with important general data. The Visitors section obviously gives you the actual number of people going into your site. Page views, on the other hand, tells you how many times each page of your site has been accessed. Lastly, the New Visitors section gives you an idea of how many new visitors you are getting, this is very important as it will help you determine your increase in reach. Each section also has a View Report option so that you can see a more detailed analysis.

In addition to these major features, GA also has a map overlay section, which gives you a breakdown of the countries from where people are accessing your site. This is especially important for those that want to market their sites globally. The application will also give you a lowdown of where the traffic actually comes from: whether it is a direct access, a query from search engines or a link from other sites. These information will then come in handy for search engine optimization purposes.