Alex Harries's diary

(More web geekery...)

I occasionally visit Silktide.com's site score analyser to see how UPSU.net's looking to the rest of the world. Last night I popped on there and had a miniature panic attack when it said "Your website appears to be visited so rarely that there is not accurate popularity information available - i.e. it is not in the top 10 million or so websites...", giving us a marketing score of 4.5 out of 10.

(I notice that our traffic is hovering around the 2,000 - 2,500 visits-per-day level (not including search engine spiders, apparently), which is definitely not too sad, but "could do better" I guess).

After all the work we put into the site, that's quite upsetting, really, so I was chuffed to see what it had to say about the BBC's homepage: "Your website appears to be visited so rarely that there is not accurate popularity information available - i.e. it is not in the top 10 million or so websites..." (4.6 out of 10).

Perhaps there's something not quite right there then...

On the plus side, without wanting to blow my employer's trumpet (stop laughing!), our scores for "How satisfying your website is likely to be" (based on variety of content, etc.) is 9.9 out of a possible 10 - the BBC "only" scores 9.8, and our "how well built and designed" score is also 9.9 vs. the BBC's 9.5 - cooool...

Of course, these great numbers mean nothing unless we're actually doing what it is that we're here to do - to keep Portsmouth's students informed. Do you think we're doing alright, or do you think we could do better? And how? Comments box, below, is open for everyone to comment in - please feel free to have your say! :o) 

You can compare the two reports here (BBC) and here (UPSU). Or not - whatever... :o)

Little update: I've just tested a site a did a couple of years ago for Gearboxman.co.uk - a gearbox company oop Norf(ish) - in Silktide and the results are really impressive (from my perspective - I was involved in the design, not the marketing of it).

Given that back then I knew comparatively little about web design, I'm really happy with the results - even the DDA requirements are good, with design, accessibility and satisfaction levels coming in at 9/10, 9.3/10 and 10/10 respectively.

The best bit about all this is that the site is the number one hit on Google.co.uk and Google.com for "racing gearboxes" - not too shabby at all.