This question represents one of the biggest challenges that practically all Web professionals share: designers, programmers, analysts, promoters, SEO’s… but Why is so difficult to evaluate the quality of a Website?

Among other reasons because first it is necessary to define what is a website with quality, something difficult as it is in many aspects a subjective evaluation -although in some industries and fields there are established standards-.

Wikipedia defines quality as:

“…non-inferiority, superiority or usefulness of something.“

“1. the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. 2. a product or service free of deficiencies.”

With these definitions now the question evolves: How to evaluate if a Website satisfies its users needs, requirements and preferences?

Search engines -like Google, Yahoo and Live- have complex algorithms that allow them to evaluate multiple factors of the indexed websites and be able to include in their results the most relevant webs related to a specific search. The title tag keywords relevancy, the web content keywords, the anchor text of the inbound links, the age of the website and many others are included among these factors. However, algorithms are not capable to weigh up many of the parameters -because of its subjective nature- that would assure a website quality, that is why technical and content quality guidelines are specified, like the Google Webmaster Guidelines, where it is advised to follow good design practices and mantain a content free of deceptive techniques.

Despite these kinds of guidelines, at the moment there is no global standard established to evaluate the quality of a website, -although interesting projects have been developed to standardized the use of Web programming languages and techniques, as The Web Standards Project, The W3C and the Microformats- but only a series of parameters related to different websites aspects, to which you can give independently more or less importance or eliminate at all of the evaluation criterion depending on the type and the objectives of the website or the evaluation level of detail.

The following are quality guidelines and evaluation questionnaires that can be used to define and ensure a website quality:

These evaluations and guidelines include the following aspects, for which I will ask questions that will help to define their concepts and I will make reference to tutorials and guides that can be taken into account while evaluating and developing a website:

The result of including the previous aspects according to the Website characteristics and goals will allow to obtain a higher credibility, authority and make our Websites to be considered of “quality”.

What are the additional factors that you think could be taken into account to evaluate a Website quality?

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