Why They Suck And How To Make Them Better

But then one day I realised that, like most of my peers, I was approaching website reviews in entirely the wrong way. Is your approach to website reviews flawed, Most website reviews list the problems with a site. Issues with performance, technical aspects, usability, aesthetics, content and countless other problems. Occasionally they look a little further by addressing social media and search engine placement. They systematically identify problems using some kind of rating system and then suggest solutions to each of these challenges. They recommend usability improvements, basic SEO and content tweaks. But they rarely dig deeper. On the face of it, this seems useful.

But in reality, it is rarely. It might fix some things in the short term that benefit the site. However, it probably won’t make that big a difference over time. The reason is, this treats the symptoms, not the underlying condition. Are you focusing on symptoms and ignoring the illness, It is like a doctor treating the symptoms of lung cancer without ever discussing with the patient the fact that they smoke forty a day. In other words, most website reviews focus on putting a sticking plaster over a more fundamental problem. Rarely does a site audit ask; how did things end up the way they have, Most website reviews focus on putting a sticking plaster over a more fundamental problem. This failure to tackle root causes was why I used to hate website reviews.

I knew the blame would inevitably fall at the feet of the digital team who built it. However, in my experience, this was rarely where the problem came from. Take for example a site’s information architecture. Most sites I review have a terrible information architecture, one that does not reflect how users see the world. But, if all my website review does is point out the problem and suggest a fix, I am providing no value. That is because the majority of people in a web team already know how to structure a site around user needs. I just end up telling them what they already know and giving some board of directors the impression the team is stupid for not fixing it.

The same is true with almost all areas. Most web teams know a website should be fast, accessible, usable, and appear at the top of search results. What is more, they spend every hour of their working day looking over their site, so the chances are they will have spotted all the same problems you point out. They will probably know the solutions too. It is not like they aren’t thinking about these things on a regular basis! What value should a website review provide, If the web team already has the answers, this leaves us with two questions. First, if they know this stuff already what value does a website review provide,