Evaluating your site
A website is never finished; it is different from printed forms of communication because it is relatively easy to keep improving.
It is important to keep evaluating, refining and improving your site for two reasons:
- because feedback and user statistics are readily available there is the opportunity to keep shaping the site as user needs and internet technology evolves
- if the content doesn’t change regularly users won’t keep coming back.
The first step in reviewing the performance of your site is to ask yourself:
- what (other) services and products should we be providing or selling online?
- is website speed and reliability appropriate, and our connection to the internet fast enough?
- is our website easy to use? Does it make it easy for users to make the most of our online services?
Six Steps to evaluating your website
As part of a study of two US nonprofit organisations’ websites, six basic measures were found to assist in evaluating how well a website is communicating with target audiences.
These included:
- users' ability to interact with the site
- the site's educational value
- the effectiveness of the site in relaying the organisation's mission
- the layout and content level of interest
- whether text is current or outdated
- how accessible the site is for the user.
How to evaluate
The second step is to identify how to evaluate all of the various aspects of your website. Consider these strategies:
Interviews
Ask staff about various aspects of the organisation's website to get frank feedback on internal issues. For example: Is it easy to update? Do you feel that you are using the internet effectively in your day-to-day work? If not, what is wrong and how could it be improved?
Interview external users (e.g. members) and ask them about their impression of or experience in using the site. Is it a good experience? How could it be improved? How would they like to interact with the organisation online?
One-off reality checks
Ask visitors to your organisation, colleagues or friends to look at your website or read your e-newsletter and comment on aspects appropriate to the user.
Focus groups
Conduct focus groups consisting of your target users – e.g. members, clients, volunteers, other stakeholders – and ask them to comment on the site's look and feel, ease of use and content. See this sample usability questionnaire template you could adopt for your focus groups.
Surveys and polls
Create a survey or quick poll and put it online or on paper to gain users' views on aspects of your site. It might be a survey on whether they would be interested in receiving an e-newsletter or downloading/purchasing products.
Feedback from the website
Create an area in your site that invites users to provide feedback on your services, what they would like to see or be able to do on the site, and feedback on the website itself.
Compare with similar sites
Keep in touch with what other similar organisations (locally and overseas) are doing online. Identify some organisations that fit these criteria, keep track of what they are doing with their website and e-newsletters and contact them to share information about your respective online activities. The exercise is best done with an organisation that is similar to yours in terms of sector, size, services, target audiences and aims. For business organisations this is known as ‘benchmarking’, but due to the problems of measuring comparable performance among nonprofits this term it is not widely used.
Website usage stats
Visitor numbers and patterns of usage of your website are important statistics to gather and look at because they can tell you who is using your site and when, what is working, what is popular and where the ‘dead’ areas are that require rejuvenation or cutting. There are various measurements used to express website usage. Unfortunately, for a range of technical reasons, none are totally reliable. The most common statistics that are captured are:
- Hit rate: ‘Hits’ are the number of images (including graphics, logos, titles or text created as graphics) downloaded onto the user's computer. So a web page comprising 15 images or sections (not unusual for a home page) would notch up 15 hits on the counter. This is not the same as 15 people viewing your site. Beware of using hits as a measure of actual visitor use. Hits are useful as a measure of trend over time but not of the actual number of visitors.
- Unique visitors and user sessions: The unique visitor count refers to how many different people visit your website in any given period. This is measured by the company that hosts your website. Their web server records every time a request comes from a new computer address (called an IP address) to view the site in a given period. But because a unique visitor may re-visit the site four times in a day, it is also important to count the number of user sessions for each unique visitor.
Depending on the aims of your website you may need to track all, or some of the following:
- the pattern of access over one day, one week, each month
- trends in visitor numbers and how many repeat visitors
- what areas of the site are visited the most
- what areas of the site are visited the least
- what routes users take through the site
- how long they stay in the site
- at what point they exit from the site
- the country of origin of the users
- what functions visitors use the most e.g. online forms
- what documents are downloaded and how often.
Your ISP usually keeps the files from the server (known as log files) that contain the raw site statistics and which they will provide to you. However you will need specialist software to interpret them. Your ISP may be able to provide this software (sometimes for free, sometimes not) or you can contact a specialist Application Service Provider (ASP). Here is an example
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Analysing the results
Online survey results, focus group feedback, anecdotal evidence from the tea-room, and results produced by software evaluation tools, all contribute to an overall picture of the health, success and popularity of your website.
Relying on just one evaluation methodology may give you a skewed view of your website, so make sure you collect evidence through a variety of methods.
If there is a consistency in the message you are getting about such things as the design, management of the site or the maintenance solution, then it is reasonable to assume that you have a problem that needs to be fixed.
There is no magic formula for analysing the results of evaluation, but there are some things you should be wary of:
- Making changes in your website – make sure you do not change those things in your site that are working.
- Acting only on one form of evaluation – such as an online poll on the home page.
- Misinterpreting data – as everyone knows, statistics can be made to show almost anything, but more often they are innocently misinterpreted. So, if the interpretation of data is the basis on which decisions are to be made on changing the structure of your site, first refer the data to someone skilled in analysing web statistics to ensure you act on valid interpretations.
- Listening to vested interests – consider who you are listening to when analysing their feedback.
- Knee-jerk reactions – avoid reacting immediately to feedback by changing parts of the site (unless there are inaccuracies in content or things that do not actually work). Rather, collate it and prepare a planned, prioritised response.
- Ignoring the future – the site might be humming along nicely with positive feedback, but it is your job to keep an eye to the future and try to anticipate what users may want one, two, three years from now.
Evaluation of your site should ideally be:
- ongoing rather than sporadic
- conducted to a level of rigour appropriate to your website and organisation.
If you meet regularly with staff involved with your website or your web developer, then make sure that evaluation is a standing item on the agenda.