Distinct Quality

This post is part advice and part shameless promotion. I work in the software industry and test large-scale enterprise websites on a daily basis. In both my personal and professional browsing, I’m constantly amazed at the common errors I find on websites of all sizes. I recently tried to download some motherboard spec’s on the ASUS website and, due to various Javascript errors, was completely unable to accomplish my goal. Even Google has issues, some of the help links within their AdWords and AdSense account pages return 404 “Page Not Found” errors.

All the sloppy work makes for an awful user experience and can even harm your search engine rankings by making areas of your site inaccessible (if a spider hits a 404, it won’t be able to see that page or any page that is linked from that page). Spelling errors on your site will cause credibility issues with your customers and prevent search engines from being able to process what you are really trying to say.

I’ve been getting a little more involved in Search Engine Optimization lately and am still shocked by the number of web pages out there that lack useful titles, have nonexistant meta-tags (despite their devalued state with SEO) don’t properly monitor their keyword usage to ensure excellent search rankings for their key terms.

I’ve written a tool that I call DistinctScan. Its available on my home page at http://www.distinctquality.com/. I urge you to run it against your web page and see how it stacks up. The report shows broken links, spelling errors, meta tag contents, keyword and keyphrase usage as well as a few other smaller features. There are still a few bugs in it, but I’m hoping to build it into a simple one-stop web tool you can use to do a quick sanity check on your pages.

Start the scan now:

Just enter the URL of the page you would like to check below. We’ll give you a unique ID and start processing your page. The processing of your web page usually takes a few minutes to complete.

Be sure to include “http://” in the address.

URL:
Submit Clear

So far, I’ve found that approximately 15% of all web pages have some type of error whether it be a broken link or a spelling error, not to mention harder to see issues such as poor usability or lack of search engine optimization. The web is, for many companies, their only exposure directly to the consumer, why do so many fail to find and fix the issues with their websites?

If you do run the tool against one or more of your web pages, let me know your thoughts! Its still a work in progress and your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 1:11 am and is filed under Automated Testing, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.