What to consider when assessing the state of an existing web site?

For a little while, I’ve been thinking about doing a piece of work to assess the current state of the website of the company I just happen to work for - I’ve not been asked for it, but I’m interested in testing out my understanding of all things web in a way that may turn out to be of practical use.

I’ve come of with a high level list of things that I might expect to be covered in the report, but not having tried this before, I’m curious as to what others may consider relevant in their own work, particularly those who are actively engaged in site re-design, or development.

Here’s the list though

  • Appearance
  • Browser compatibility
  • RWD
  • Scope of content
  • Quality of content
  • Page performance
  • Social media
  • Utility
  • SEO
  • Web presence management

What might you add/change/delete to that?

I’d say you missed out the most important one - customers top tasks and whether your site and content enables them to complete those tasks.

In a way, that’s what “Scope of Content” was intended to cover - looking at what’s there, or not as the case may be. However, without saying to much about the website is, it contains almost nothing that would be considered “functionality”. It has a link off to an Outlook OWA portal, but precious little beyond that. I’ll give it a bit more thought though, because one thing it’s desparately lacking any meaningful content on the ‘Careers’ page. Something along the lines of a CMS type capability (even if done via a static page generator) for listing vacancies, would be a major step forward.

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