Web Site Creation: Good Practice Guidelines Self Assessment Of Project Web Sites

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Web Site Creation Good Practice Guidelines
Self Assessment Of Project Web Sites

• Brian Kelly
• UK Web Focus
• UKOLN
• University of Bath

Email B.Kelly_at_ukoln.ac.uk URL http//www.ukoln.ac.
uk/
UKOLN is supported by
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Why?

• Self assessment of your Web site can be used to
• Monitor compliance of your Web site with
  standards
• Report on usage of your Web site
• Monitor problems with your Web site
• Benchmarking of NOF-digi project Web sites can be
  used to
• Identify areas of best practices
• Identify areas in which improvements are needed

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How?

• Many Web-based analysis services are available
• HTML, XML and CSS validators to check on
  compliance with standards
• Link checkers
• Usage analysis
• Linkage analysis
• Performance monitoring
• Some services are available for free (e.g. funded
  by advertising and free service provides limited
  functionality) and others are licensed

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Systematic Monitoring

• You may find it useful to
• Monitor the status of your Web site
• Nos. of pages indexed.
• Nos. of links to your Web site
• Accessibility of your Web site
• Compliance with standards
• Downtime of the service
• Monitor trends
• Do the findings change over time / after
  dissemination
• Compare your findings with your peers
• Comparison with other projects
• Comparison with other institutions
• Comparison with other communities

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Monitoring

• Many evaluation tools and Web services are
  available (some for free)

See lthttp//www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/works
hops/jusw-2001/auditing-workshop/gt for exercises
from Auditing and Monitoring Your Web Sites
workshop
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Conclusions

• To conclude
• You should ensure that you have procedures for
  monitoring various aspects of your Web service
• A wide range of tools area available, including
  some which are free
• Note that tools may give flawed results - e.g.
  see paper on Automated Benchmarking Of Local
  Authority Web Sites at lthttp//www.ukoln.ac.uk/web
  -focus/events/conferences/euroweb-2001/gt