This lesson covers site evaluation. If you are attempting to create good websites, it's obviously vital to know which sites are good and which aren't. Evaluating your site lets you figure out where it might be lacking. One way to carry out evaluation is with a "checklist".
Evaluation
Evaluating websites means determining whether or not they are "good". Normally this fits in with what we have discussed in this course (e.g., a good website must have worthwhile content) but sometimes there are additional goals depending on the specific website. For example, one goal of an online CD store would be to sell CDs: this means particular attention might need to be paid to the ordering part of the site.
Why evaluate?
Evaluating your own site can help you spot problems and make appropriate changes.
It helps to have somebody else evaluate the site for you (see last lesson for discussion of why this is beneficial), but you can probably gain some benefit even if you go through the procedure yourself.
Procedure
One way to evaluate a site is by using a kind of checklist. These checklists can cover various different aspects of design - for example, you could use a checklist of common mistakes, simply to ensure that you didn't make any of them.
Usability testing, discussed last time, was another form of evaluation for the specific (or general, depending on your point of view) issue of usability. You can use checklists to evaluate usability as well, but they aren't a replacement for usability testing.
