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See also:
Compare CMS v blog v wiki v forum websites
Compare CMS v HTML websites
Compare website software
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It's often necessary to compare one website with another. Perhaps you need to choose a new application to install, and you need to know which one will suit your purposes best; or maybe you'd like to see which web designer does a better job; or how strong the other websites in your niche are; or what type of site would be best for your business.

There are many ways to compare websites, and you can get a good overview or specific details according to the way you examine them. The first thing to look at is the type or class of website, and then the web applications used. Here is a list of 10 factors to investigate, when looking at an existing site and seeing how it is built and how successful it is:

1. Type of site
2. Main web application used
3. Modern or old-fashioned construction
4. Codebase and server type
5. Usability appraisal
6. Marketing appraisal
7. Website quality analysis
8. Main site keyword - search position for that keyword
9. Alexa ranking and traffic estimation
10. Number of backlinks

Flat and dynamic websites

There are two main classes of website construction, hand-coded or dynamic sites. Hand-coded (or hard-coded) sites are the older style, where pages are built by hand in a desktop application such as Dreamweaver, then uploaded to the website by FTP. These are termed 'flat' sites because the pages exist physically, are static, and cannot change.

Dynamic sites run from a database, and the pages do not exist - they are created on-the-fly by software installed on the webserver. These applications take care of all the page layout and design issues automatically. They also supply advanced levels of functionality that are difficult and expensive to include in flat sites. All kinds of websites are of this type now, including CMS (content management systems), ecommerce, blogs, wikis, and forums. In fact many types of modern website could not exist if database-driven functionality did not exist.

All modern main website applications, and most large sites and those with complex functionality are of this type now. The advantages over the old hand-built type are so numerous and so clear that there are few sites now that benefit from the individual page coding form of treatment. Perhaps only very small, simple sites with a minuscule budget are now best hand-coded. Highly complex sites with a completely individual functionality type that is rare or even unique might use hand coding; and of course these sites have high budgets.

A content management system or CMS is a website type where the pages do not exist physically but are built from a database and image folders on request. The pages can be edited  online by the website owner, and design issues are taken care of by templates that can be installed or uninstalled quickly. Adding features or even functions to the site is done with plugins, not custom development. In all, these sites are a big step forward in website management, and almost certainly the way 90% of enterprise websites will be run in future.

Website analysis

So, to compare websites, there are a number of factors to be examined. What you are interested in precisely will depend on your reasons for carrying out this analysis. Here we cover most of the common questions, and run through them in the order of the list given above.

1. Type of site
This refers to the website function. Is it an ecommerce site or a brochure site? The first sells products directly via a checkout backend; the second has a display of the enterprise's business services, products and objectives. There are dozens of other types, ranging from blogs to wikis.

Sites can perform a huge range of tasks and functions, from a small blog to a monster ecommerce operation. The objective of the site needs to be assessed, and how well it does that job. Efficiency is what counts here.

2. Web application employed
What type of webapp have they used? An ecommerce or shopping cart application - a CMS - a blog app - or hand-coding.

Sometimes it's hard to tell, but clues might be seen in the source code. Web applications can be commercial or open-source, and there are pros and cons to each.

3. Modern or old style
Modern websites are run from databases as against using hard-coding. There are hundreds of reasons for this, such as initial cost, speed of rollout, ease of editing, ease of management, cost of expansion, and so on. See if you can identify which type the site is.

4. Codebase
Pages normally get output as HTML but in some cases they may be of other less common types. Examples are PHP and ASP. These can give clues as to what type of website application is in use. PHP is an open-source web code that is hugely popular, and can be described as a basic Internet technology. ASP is the Microsoft equivalent, which is much smaller in numbers and does the same job.

The most common type of server is the LAMP server, or Apache / Linux arrangement. This can be called the 'normal' server as it accounts for 60 to 70% of the servers on the Net. It is open-source technology of the highest quality, and goes together with PHP coding. More dynamic sites use PHP - MySQL coding and databases, normally on a LAMP server, than any other type. Next along comes the Microsoft proprietary equivalent, ASP - MS SQL Server, which is the codebase and database arrangement used on Windows servers, which might be around 25% of those on the Net.

5. Usability
Usability needs to hit you in the face as soon as you land on a site. In other words you must see clearly, instantly, these two things:

• What the site does
  
• The next step you should take to achieve your goal

If you can't see either of those things straight away then the site design is faulty. It might look nice and be fun but it won't make any money - or at least, the earning performance of the site is reduced.

Usability is hard to define except where clearly poor. It has many factors that contribute to it - logic,  layout, navigation, colours, fonts - and these all need to contribute to a smooth, obvious achievement of objectives.

In general, websites that work get good testimonials. These are often product-related, such as "The [widget] is great and we got it in the post the next day". The hardest testimonial of all to achieve, which is received by the tiniest fraction of websites, goes like this: "Your website is so easy to use compared to the others". If you get that type of comment in your email, then you have employed website contractors who are among a very small number indeed - the most skilled, and those who recognise that sites need to work properly.

6. Marketing
Marketing is the skill with which you are presented with the purchase proposition, and how well it succeeds. The perfect result would be if you don't notice anything at all until you have completed your purchase - and then you simply feel these were the right people to deal with. That's good marketing. Any other reaction, according to its level, is a lesser success.

Goods and services have to be sold, you have to lay them out and then tell people why they should buy from you. If you succeed then they will become customers. If you are doing your job well in all departments, they become repeat customers. That's the pinnacle of success for a website, and the marketing aspects have a big part to play.

7. Website quality analysis
There are many ways to evaluate a website's quality. Several areas could be looked at. It might even be possible to create a scoring method for this, with some work.

Here are the areas we should look at:

• appearance
• functionality
• web standards compliance
• legal compliance

It would be hard to decide which of these is most important since if the site fails in any of these areas, it will either not succeed, or cost the owner money. Therefore all are important.

Appearance: this must be good, and perhaps of more relevance, be correct for its intended market. A website for teen gamers will not appeal to a seniors insurance market audience, and vice versa.

Functionality: this allows the site to do the jobs required. If the functionality is faulty, or just not there, the site cannot work correctly and stands a higher chance of failing commercially.

Standards-compliance: if a website is not standards-compliant now, it will experience more problems in search and have legal issues. Accessibility is a component here, and unskilled site builders will fail dramatically in this area.

Unfortunately many application developers and implementers have never heard of standards compliance. Incredibly, this figure stands at around 75% of them currently - and this figure is very easy to check.

Legal compliance: sites that fail badly in the standards compliance area almost always have legal issues. Commercial websites in many countries have to comply with the law now. Legal compliance is one of the standards compliance areas that many website builders have never heard of.

The simplest way to establish whether a site has any chance of complying with standards is to perform a basic page code validation check. This is the simplest and most basic of tests that can be performed on a site. If a website fails this test, for its index page, then it is highly unlikely that it passes all other tests; apart from being simple logic, this is confirmed by deeper analysis of faulty sites.

To check a website's code, which is called validation, go to:
http://validator.w3.org

...and enter the domain name. This will check the code of the index page. A site may pass with a green icon and a pass confirmed message; or it will fail with errors and warnings.

Less than 5 faults is not too bad, and might mean that the web application is of good quality but the implementers or content editors just made some simple errors. However it also implies, of course, that nothing is checked - perhaps unwise for an enterprise's front page and window on the world.

Over 40 or 50 faults is appalling and basically not code as we know it. There will be any number of issues as a result. Whoever built this application and/or page should not be employed in this work. Almost certainly there will be legal issues of several kinds here. Not only that, but the enterprise clearly doesn't have the slightest grasp of quality control, which is probably the most worrying sign of all.

Between these two error figures you can basically take your pick as to how incompetent you feel the website managers are.

Fault levels above this indicate novices who presumably have some other daytime job.

8. Main website keyword
See if you can guess what the site's main keyphrase or search term is. It's probably the one in the index page title or page heading. If it is hard to guess then possibly the site lacks direction.

Search that term on large search engines and see what their position in the SERPs is (the search engine results pages). This is one indicator of site success.

9. Alexa data
Another way to find information for a site is to look at Alexa or Spyfu data, and in fact the graphs on Alexa are one of the very few ways to physically compare two or more websites. Another method of the same type is to use Google Analytics, which also provides comparative graphs. If you use GA, your own traffic data is available in outline to any enquirer, of course.

If you go to alexa.com and enter the site name, you will be presented with various numbers and graphs. Much of this is totally inaccurate, and in addition heavily skewed toward sites that are good webmaster resources, but by comparative experience you can gain some insights.

Overall world website rank is inaccurate until the site is in the top 1,000 or so, as the data is massively skewed. Traffic numbers are miles out as well. As an example, a site with 20,000 visitors a day is reported here as having 30,000 a month. The figures are useless in this regard. However, comparative graphs given here are useful.

We give Alexa as a reference for three reasons: you will see them quoted everywhere, so if omitted you might question why. And, although their actual traffic data is utterly useless for every site that we have actual figures for (and is thus proven worthless as far as we are concerned), nevertheless some comparative data is of use (two sites can be compared in the hope that the traffic data is equally wrong). Thirdly, their information for really big sites is interesting and of use, and likely to be more accurate. The numbers have a better chance of being right, and the comparisons are very useful.

10. Backlinks
Finally, another measure we might apply to a site is the number and quality of its backlinks, aka links, or references on other websites to that site.

Link numbers cannot be checked on Google as the figure is about as useful as an Alexa traffic figure - miles out, and in some cases around 10% or less of the real figure.

However there are other reasonable guides that can be used. In all cases there will be more links than the numbers reported, even by the most 'accurate' of sources. There might be as many as double the number, on these other sources. Via Google, as for Alexa traffic, you can multiply by ten or more sometimes to get a more accurate result.

We advise that Yahoo Site Explorer is currently the best all-round source as a single check (single sources are not reliable though). Go to:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

...and enter the domain name. Then adjust the various parameters given and you can get a rough idea of backlink numbers. Add a percentage to their quoted number. Your added percentage is what by experience you judge to be reasonable for this type of site and other factors. Remember that the real number of links will always be greater than the figure given.

Then, for a laugh, check the number given by Google. It might be around 25% or even less of the Yahoo Site Explorer number. You will then realise why we tell you, "If an SEO company tell you to check your link numbers in Google, you can tell right away that you know more about SEO then they do".

Google withhold most links as they do not wish you to know what ones they can see. One might consider, in that case, that even providing a facility to check links with them is pointless, since it obviously confuses a very large number of people - plenty of them in SEO and especially in marketing.

PageRank is another handy tool, but hardly a critical factor. It is Google's measure of link equity for the site, ie the number and quality of backlinks, combined (now) with a measure of traffic rank. As a specific guide to anything in particular it is of no use at all, with one exception: as a guide to the value of advertising on the site it is excellent. And this of course is its main purpose.

As a guide to success for a search term it is of less use. A PR3 site can easily beat a PR6 site for a given term that they both compete for, if the PR3 page (or page + site) is better. A PR0 site (page rank zero) can easily get Google #1 search results, if the page and site are of better quality than competitors. However if ALL other factors were equal then, indeed, a PR5 page on a PR5 site would beat a PR4 page on a PR4 site in the search results for a term they both compete for. On Google, but not necessarily on other SEs. All else, though, is rarely equal.

Page rank confuses even more people than how to check for backlinks. It is far less relevant than generally thought, especially when you consider there are two forms of it: TBPR or toolbar pagerank, the type that is available to you; and Google's own value for a website, which is likely to be different. For example they value a site by many more criteria which you cannot easily evaluate, such as with TrustRank and other credibility measurements, domain age and type, and so on. None of these are seen reflected in the toolbar PageRank.

You can find the PageRank by using an online checker, of which there are dozens if not hundreds; or by installing the Google PR gauge on your browser. This is a two-way device though - you get info from them, they get info from you. The Alexa gauge is the same of course.

Vital but invisible factors

Some factors cannot be seen from the frontend of the site, they are admin factors that, from the outside, as a visitor, you cannot see.

One of the most important of all is how easy it is for the owner to manage the site. This is a crucial factor since it can turn a good website or web application into a nightmare if it is poor. This is more relevant of late since as database-driven web applications replace hand-coded sites, this issue gains importance - some webapps are easy to use; some are complex, with a steep learning curve; and some are plain dreadful.

Conclusion
You have seen some of the methods used to compare websites, and you should be able to get a reasonable idea of many site factors. It takes experience to evaluate some of these points, though. With luck you will be able to see enough to be able to make the judgement you were aiming for.

Comparing websites is a good way to learn about website quality analysis - which is the final arbiter.