It’s the end of the school year — the perfect time to grade your website. Today I tried the free analysis tool, Website Grader, to see how well Contextures would do.
It’s easy to do — just fill in the website address and your email, then click the Generate Report button. There’s also an option to enter the website address for competitor sites, so you can compare your results with theirs. I picked a couple of other Excel sites, so I could see where Contextures stood in comparison.
A couple of minutes later, the results were shown, and Contextures scored 96.8 — pretty good, with room for improvement.
Website Content
Website Grader was impressed that I had a blog, and posted there recently. It told me how many Google index pages are on my site (156), and said, "Generally, the more pages your site has within the Google cache, the better." So, I’d better add a few more!
The readability score surprised me — College Undergraduate. I try to avoid five-dollar words, and describe things as simply as possible, but if you read my website, you’re obviously pretty smart.
There’s a link to a Blog Grader too, if you want to try that.
Website Optimization
The report warned me that my Page Title was too long — by 1 character, so I’ve fixed that. It also recommended that I get the font tags out of the page. I’m starting an online CSS course next week, so I’ll improve things after that.
Website Promotion
The report even gives you a Twitter Grade, if there’s an account tied to the website. I was surprised to get 91.36, since I only have a few followers, and don’t tweet very often.
Monthly Reports
I signed up for the free monthly report, so I’ll see if the minor changes that I made had any effect. They’re also promoting a paid service, but it starts at $250/month, so I’ll pass on that.
What’s Your Grade?
Have you graded your website? Did you agree with the outcome? Please share your results in the comments.
__________
96.4 for DDoE. They’re telling me all the stuff I already know: too many images (I like images), no alt tags on the images (I don’t like writing alt tags). Don’t they know I’m lazy?
Yeah, I ignored those image comments too.
PeltierTech.com grade: 99. Can’t argue with that.
It tells me my content’s readability is advanced/postgraduate, and that I should make it more simple so a majority of my target audience can understand it. I don’t agree so much here. My target audience is smart people, and judging from the feedback I receive, there is not a huge problem with understandability. People who need something simpler can go visit about.com or something.
I also got a Twitter grade of 91, but they must grade on the curve.
The blog grader does not work. My blog is peltiertech.com/WordPress/ (note the capitals). The blog grader insists on making it all lowercase, then says it can’t find the blog (even though the website grader found it).
I ignored several of the suggestions, and tweaked a couple of things. Like Dick said, I’m not going to reduce the number of images on my pages — they’re key to what brings people to the site. I did fix some missing alt text on them though.
I wish I could be brief, but…
I just found your blog and Contextures yesterday, and I love both! Needless to say, I am now a subscriber, to your blog at least. (Any other sign-up stuff I shy away from. We get enough spam/garbage that comes from nowhere, we don’t need more. If I do these things I usually use something like PCJay@, or SpamJay@ as my address so I can identify who’s spilling my e-address, but I trust you.)
I wish I was in on your Excel 30 days thing. If I search long enough will I find the entire series? Although I’ve built some hellacious spreadsheets, I’m still an Excel newbie. For instance, your lessons on offset/index/match answered a lot of my
Question and a comment…
How do I find the next HIGHEST value in an array/row/column? VLOOKUP(…,true) does lower, but what’s higher?
Comment… I tried that Website Grader. It’s nice, but not dynamic. I added something that actually worked on my IPhone, but when I rechecked it still said it wasn’t on my site. Owell
@Jay, thanks, I’m glad you like the blog.
To find the next highest number, you could sort the list in descending order, then use INDEX and MATCH. For example:
=INDEX(B1:B21,MATCH(D2,B1:B21,-1))
You can find the list of articles for the 30 Functions series here:
http://www.contextures.com/30excelfunctionsin30days30xl30d.html