Webgazette.co.uk

I recently wrote about getting in to the top ten on silktide’s sitescore. Since then I have been up and down the top ten due to the strange way that people seem to vote. I find it strange because there is no middle ground - votes are either for the lowest (1) or the highest (10) with the exception of very few who have voted a 9. Does this mean that you either hate or love the design of webgazette.co.uk?

At the moment I am at #3 on the list just below Andreas Viklund. Not bad considering this is out of 140,000 sites tested. Incidentally this is good news for Andreas as he has helped in some way with 4 out of 10 in the top ten sites and more importantly all of the top 3 at the moment! Andreas advised me about how to improve and optimise my web site.

You must remember that this is just fun and it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. You may wonder what the point is at all - after all, it is just a silly test and a lot of the votes are likely to be biased.

I’ve considered this myself, and on the one hand it is a bit of clever marketing by Silktide and doesn’t mean a thing, on the other it does have some value if you disregard the votes and marketing aspects of the tests and look at the design, accessibility and experience scores. To score well in these categories your website will have to be constructed with valid code and technically be a good, well designed website. It will also need to load quickly and have pleanty of features to keep your visitors happy. This doesn’t cover all of the details of the test but you get the idea.

So if you have made a website, it may be worth testing it on silktide to see how you do. You may not get to the top but it will give you an idea about where improvments can be made and give you an indication of the quality of your work.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.