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Website Applications - Comparison and Judgement Criteria
We rate and judge many website applications on this site. There are many pages of reviews and comparisons here, so it therefore makes sense to outline our basic judging standards just the once, in a central place. Here seems a good place.
We specialise in honest expert-user reviews of dynamic website applications. We have no commercial tie-ups or affiliations in this area.
Our webapp judging focusBe advised that we focus on SEO and usability issues. This means that if an application makes little concession to the fact that search success is the prime requirement for most websites now, and/or is difficult to use, we cannot recommend it - however good it might be in other areas.
As far as we are concerned, developers are wasting their time if they cannot provide:
1. A minimum standard of search engine compliance, even if this is via plugins. Ideally, full SEF URLs and per-page unique metadata are needed, though some movement toward this may be acceptable.
2. A reasonable usability level FOR THE APPLICATION OWNER. Note that web application usability and website usability ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.
3. A website accessibility rating of single-A as a minimum, for the resulting generated pages.
4. Web pages that validate for code with the W3C. We would accept up to 5 errors as a practical figure. From 5 to 20 errors is poor-quality code; 20 - 40 errors is very poor quality code; over 40 errors is trash and does not qualify as HTML (or one of its cousins).
The web application end-userThe end-user of a web application is the owner and user of the application. You should note that there is a mistaken belief among some developers that the site visitor is the 'end-user'. This is completely false. The best parallel here is to compare the webapp to a printing press: the end-user of a press is the publisher, who purchased it and works with it all day; not the newspaper reader. The reader is the publisher's customer, not the customer of the people who build the printing presses. In the same way, the end-user of a web application (which, like a printing press, is a piece of machinery for publishing) is the person who works with it, not the peruser of work published with it.
In some cases, muddle-headedness like this can obscure the fact that an application needs to be easy to use, and do what the user needs - and the user is the owner who works with it every day. Not someone who might read the newspaper once and then dispose of it, or only see the website for eight seconds once in their life.
Website application developers are different from website developers. The former are in a B2B business where the user is not the final customer; the latter are in a B2C business where the user is the final customer.
Certainly, the website resulting from a web application needs to do its job well - but if the search engines hate it and the owner has ulcers from using it, a website will probably not be much use to a prospective site visitor - especially since they won't be able to find it in the first place.
Website applications need to be easy to use for the owner, and generate sites that succeed in search. If they can't do that, they are a waste of time.
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