How “well designed, popular and accessible” is your website?

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How “well designed, popular and accessible” is your website?

October 27, 2004

You’d probably already have heard of or seen Silktide Sitescore that purports to “rate how well designed, popular and accessible your website is”. A while back it used to tell me I was a criminal for having an inaccessible website. I got sub-5 scores and a close-to-zero score for accessibility. I was surprised but attributed it the script doing something wrong somewhere (it is automated after all and Cynthia did tell me my site was OK in terms of accessibility).

Recently, after reading Ingoal’s post on an update to his score, I tried out Silktide again and to my surprise, got a respectable 8.6. (Ingoal’s a fellow Advisor at SitePoint - this guy knows computers.) After some fixing some XHTML-validation borkage, I eked out a 10 for accessibility and managed to get a 9.2 overall score (and a 9.3 once). That puts me in the top 10 (true to form, I’m right at the bottom at number 10 below SitePoint).

Screenshot of Silktide SiteScore rankings with blog.codefront.net in 10th position

I’m not sure it means anything except that it goes to show what a poor boy I must be to keep posting about rankings and scores. Perhaps it’s my low self-esteem working here.

But I have to say again, thank you for your donations to Firefox and keep donating whether you do so via my donation link or not! (What am I talking about? Read more. This too.)

Posted by Chu Yeow at October 27, 2004 SGT |

Permalink |

| Category: Browsers, Personal, Web development

22 Comments & TrackBacks ()

New design marked
How timely is this?! I just redesigned this site today. (named the new theme palindrome ) And today, Che Yeow wrote about thi

Posted by: iChris.ws on October 28, 2004 1am

Cool. I can at most get 8.2 at this blog:
http://blog.cs.cityu.edu.hk/users/50307104/

:-)

Posted by: minghong on October 28, 2004 1am

You’ve moved up to position 8!

Posted by: alsotop on October 28, 2004 2am

Hah! I just got 9.4, putting me in 4th :)

Posted by: Neil T. on October 28, 2004 2am

Silktide Sitescore
Via Redemption in a Blog is Silktide Sitescore, an automated tool which tells you how good your site is in terms of design, accessibility and popularity.

Posted by: Neil's World on October 28, 2004 3am

Interesting tool. I actually got a 9.1 for accessibility, which is pretty good, but I had a 4.6 for marketing. I think I may be proud of that. :) Apparently, the tool things the experience on my site is not too good, which is possible since it may be a wee bit *too* content/text-focused.

Posted by: Manuzhai on October 28, 2004 4am

I only get 9.0, so I don’t make the top list. That’s good in a way, cos people would only end up being disappointed :)

Posted by: Si on October 28, 2004 10am

Well, I wrote an entry in my WP blog (the ephemeral musings of michael greene) but I can’t seem to figure out track/pingback.

Thanks for the link, and glad to see your site fared well. I was surprised at the 8.4 I got, which I deemed a little too high for my site (but hey, I’ll take it). Sitescore’s reliance on Google for key portions of the test might give it a degree of bias though.

Posted by: Michael on October 28, 2004 11am

I see u’re 2nd in user rated.

Stop voting yourself!!! :P

Posted by: TedFox on October 28, 2004 1pm

TedFox: Hey I only voted once! :p

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on October 28, 2004 1pm

silktide sitescore
incuriosito da questo post di redemption ho fatto testare anche io il mio sito da silktide e ne è risultato questo per il blog:

e questo per la pagina dei progetti:

ovviamente il risultato varia in base al contenuto della pagina…

Posted by: Full(o)bloG on October 28, 2004 2pm

Somethings wrong because they can’t seem to find my website (maybe they can’t handle foreign TLD’s ?).

Posted by: Bart N. on October 28, 2004 8pm

Every time I try to test a web site I get directed to this page: http://www.silktide.com/index.php?pagename=404. I’ve even tried http://www.microsoft.com and http://www.sitepoint.com in case they were having a problem finding my URIs.

Posted by: Andy Mason on October 28, 2004 9pm

Bart, Andy: I think the site’s broken now (and it looks like they redesigned). It doesn’t work for me either.

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on October 28, 2004 9pm

Very well done!

I managed to get an 8.9 on my blog (http://www.surfionline.com) as well as a 9.2 on http://www.mybboard.com.

Pretty nifty little tool. ^_^

Posted by: Chris Boulton on October 29, 2004 11am

after trying out that site…i started to get lotsa referral spams…donno whether there is any connection but…it jus started…anyone has the same issues?

Posted by: jim on October 29, 2004 9pm

Nobody Likes Me, Everybody Hates Me
While going through my (extensive and seemingly neverending) feed of blog posts, I came across this post about rating “how well designed, popular and accessible your website is” over on Redemption In A Blog.

Posted by: The Calm Dreariness on October 30, 2004 8pm

What a fascinating little tool.

Posted by: Rob on October 31, 2004 1am

Yes sorry, it was broken - we had such a insane rise in traffic that day (>2000%) our servers simply couldn’t handle it!

We fixed that now and a host of other things, you might want to take a look. Your SiteScore icon can update itself now, for instance.

Thanks for all the feedback!

Member of Silktide development team

Posted by: Oliver on November 4, 2004 5am

This site I designed (http://www.mothershivaa.com [yes, the domain name is not quite right, that’s something we’re trying to get fixed]) — probably one of the only spiritual sites around to have accessible, standards-compliant markup ;-) — scored a 10 in accessibility, 8.6 in design, 6.8 in experience, and 3.5 in marketing (overall 6.1). I don’t expect the marketing score to go up by much (for some reason Google doesn’t index it properly; no title, no description, no nothing… and it’s been up for a while now), but the experience should go up once I get the contact form in place. And I might just combine the ‘welcome’ page and the ‘home’ page to fix the lack of text.

Posted by: Shiv Jha-Mathur on November 8, 2004 11pm