As a web developer who has taken on many different sites over the years, one of the valuable skills I’ve developed is how to go through and access a site for it’s overall quality. Sometimes this is our own site, one that we’ve been building and working on over time and it has grown organically (which is to say, without as much careful planning as we might have wished), but it could also be a site that someone has asked us to take over or to just assess for their team to get an idea of where they sit. Quality is my chosen way to describe all of the things that are not about the site’s direct purpose, but contribute to the user experience, site stability, and maintainability. These attributes are important to all sites, regardless of how they are built or what purpose they serve.

Websites are something that nearly all businesses and organizations end up having or needing, and for the majority of those site owners web development is not their specific focus. For those people, I’d like to help you understand the current state of your site, what elements are the underlying cause of any issues, and what you could do to improve. While I’d like to start offering this as a service to folks, I’ll never be able to work with more than a small number of the millions of sites that exist. With that in mind, I’m going to start by creating some content for site owners to self-assess and then offer some tips on how to go about making their sites better.

My particular focus is around web performance, but a quality site experience involves a great deal more than that, so I’ll be creating content around accessibility, SEO, stability, and maintainability as well.

For each topic, the structure will follow a similar structure, attempting to answer three questions. Using performance as an example, these would be:

  1. Is my site slow?
  2. Why is my site slow?
  3. How can I make it faster?

Every site is different in terms of their target audience and their own goals for each of these areas, but a baseline level of performance and accessibility, an awareness of SEO, etc. will help every site’s experience. This content could be useful to site owners with a wide variety of technical experience, but I’m going to assume you are starting from scratch. I’ll also be demonstrating and linking to free tools and resources only.

I am interested in doing this myself for a few sites in addition to helping people do it themselves. If you are a non-profit organization, I can offer this service for free. I can’t help everyone, but if you submit your organization and site details into this form, then I will let you know if am able to do an assessment of your site.