More candidates for the usability award 2010

At the website usabilityaward.wikispaces.com you will find some extra websites who are probably in the race for the usability award 2010.

At this moment, only www.helenahoeve.nl has a score of 42 (or more) according to the Web Guidelines Test. So I will not test these sites.

Candidates for the Dutch Usability Award 2010

At the site frankwatching.com there are 40 websites mentioned as candidate for the Dutch usability award 2010. To test the usability of these sites I decide to check the webguidelines score for these sites. In an earlier test the Helenahoeve got 42 points. I will mention the sites here with 42 points or more:

1. www.alkmaar.nl 45 points; 
2. www.infomil.nl 43 points;
3. www.assen.nl the maximum score of 47 points;
4. www.arrow.nl 44 points;
5. www.pdashop.nl 42 points.

Are the sites valid according to the W3C validator.

1. www.alkmaar.nl Valid XHTML Transitional;
2. www.infomil.nl Not valid, 15 errors;
3. www.assen.nl  Valid XHTML Strict;
4. www.arrow.nl Valid XHTML Transitional;
5. www.pdashop.nl Not valid, 16 errors;

The best sites seems to be alkmaar.nl, assen.nl and arrow.nl.

The next question is of course "How fast are these sites according to Pingdom tools?"

1. www.alkmaar.nl 2.8 seconds / 0.8 seconds;
2. www.assen.nl 5.3 seconds / 5.1 seconds;
3. www.arrow.nl 0.6 seconds, www.arrow.nl/rock/ 1.7 seconds / 1.3 seconds;

The speed of the Helenahoeve was 0.7 seconds. See also the Dutch page overdewebsite.helenahoeve.nl/snelheid.htm.


Assen.nl is slow, Arrow.nl seems to use Flash. So alkmaar.nl is my favorite after helenahoeve.nl.

How to improve Safe Browsing

Remember my first post on this blog? It was about malware on the site. According to Google nowadays almost every website could be infected with malware, and I believe that that is true.

As webmaster I want 2 things:

1. That the site does not contain malware;
2. That I do not link to a site containing malware.

The second option seems to be the hardest, because I don't have control over the sites to which I link. So I thought, may be should I use Google's Safebrowsing website.

With some help of Snoopy I created some PHP code to test if a specific website is suspicious. The idea is good, however the bottleneck is the response time. It takes more than 6 seconds to check 36 external links.

See for example this Dutch testpage and be patient ;-) All external links where created with this PHP function:

function showLink($naam, $titel, $url) {

  $snoopy = new Snoopy;

  $file = "http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=".$url;

  $snoopy->fetchtext($file);

  $suspicious = stripos($snoopy->results,"Site is listed as suspicious");

  if ($suspicious == FALSE) {

    echo "normal external link";

  }

  else {

    echo "warning";

  }

}

May be should I leave it to the browsers. When I try to visit the site mashaei.ir with:

1. Google Chrome - I get a safety alert
2. Mozilla Firefox - I do not get a safety alert
3. Mozilla Firefox with the Web Of Trust addon - I get a safety alert
4. Safari (on a Mac) - I do not get a safety alert
5. Internet Explorer 8 - I do not get a safety alert
6. Opera - I do not get a safety alert

So, I advice to start Safe Browsing now by using

1. Google Chrome, or 
2. Mozilla Firefox with the Web Of Trust addon 

as your default browser. This despite the IE8 Smartscreen Filter ...

Update 14 march 2010: There are also Web Of Trust addons for Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. So I advice to browse only with one of the following browsers with the WOT addon.

1. Google Chrome
2. Mozilla Firefox
3. Internet Explorer

Update 28 march 2010: Discovered that the site www.debontestegge.nl is not safe according to Google Chrome and to Mozilla Firefox. Browse safe. Use:

1. Google Chrome with the WOT addon or
2. Mozilla Firefox with the WOT addon.

Google gives a warning, while WOT trust this site.

Normal, large, larger and larger

Just another test. How many times is it possible to increase the font-size before there appears a horizontal scrolbar. This time the test is in Firefox on a 1024x768 pixel monitor.

1. bol.com 1x 'CTRL +' gives a horizontal scrollbar
2. funda.nl 4x 'CTRL +' gives a horizontal scrollbar
3. helenahoeve.nl After 8x 'CTRL +' (the maximum fontsize), there is still no horizontal scrollbar
4. nu.nl 5x 'CTRL +' gives a horizontal scrollbar
5. philips.nl 1x 'CTRL +' gives a horizontal scrollbar
6. postbus51.nl 1x 'CTRL +' gives a horizontal scrollbar
7. rabobank.nl 1x 'CTRL +' gives a horizontal scrollbar
8. vrom.nl 1x 'CTRL +' gives a horizontal scrollbar
9. wehkamp.nl 1x 'CTRL +' gives a horizontal scrollbar
10. wnf.nl 2x 'CTRL +' gives a horizontal scrollbar

This gives the following ranking for allowed font-size:

Only helenahoeve.nl did not get an horizontal scrollbar! That's great.

Getting it all together

The website helenahoeve.nl is a great site which could be improved in the following ways:

Safety

1. Ask for ratings on www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/www.helenahoeve.nl;
2. Make the forms secure;

Accesability

1. Create a logical tab order through links, form controls, and objects by using the tabindex attribute;
2. Provide keyboard shortcuts to important links (including those in client-side image maps), form controls, and groups of form controls by using the accesskey attribute;

Update: According to the Dutch page http://www.webrichtlijnen.nl/handleiding/ontwikkeling/productie/links-navigatie/sneltoets-koppelingen/ the use of the accesskey attribute is not recommended.

Usability of the forms

1. Detect an error on a form as soon as possible;
2. Let the user correct the error on the form directly;

Popularity

1. Try to improve the visibility in search engines as Bing and Yahoo.

Thank you for following these tests. 

Lipperhey scores

There is a great tool which probably make all other tests unnecessary. It is called Lipperhey. The results are:

1. bol.com Technical 7.2, SEO Score 73%, Populatity 10.0, Overall score 8.2
2. funda.nl Technical 6.4, SEO Score 75%, Populatity 10.0, Overall score 8.0
3. helenahoeve.nl Technical 8.6, SEO Score 76%, Populatity 7.0, Overall score 7.7
4. nu.nl Technical 5.7, SEO Score 48%, Populatity 10.0, Overall score 6.8
5. philips.nl Technical 6.0, SEO Score 59%, Populatity 9.0, Overall score 7.0
6. postbus51.nl Technical 8.0, SEO Score 74%, Populatity 9.0, Overall score 8.1
7. rabobank.nl Technical 7.3, SEO Score 76%, Populatity 10.0, Overall score 8.3
8. vrom.nl Technical 7.2, SEO Score 55%, Populatity 10.0, Overall score 7.6
9. wehkamp.nl Technical 4.0, SEO Score 0%, Populatity 3.0, Overall score 2.3
10. wnf.nl Technical 7.5, SEO Score 67%, Populatity 9.0, Overall score 7.7

The most important thing to do seems to be getting more popular ;-)

Time to work on the backlinks. But first the results as a graph:

SERP Search results

SERP is standing for Search Engine Results Page, searching for the websites gives these results on Google:

1. bol Number 1
2. funda Number 1
3. helenahoeve Number 1
4. nu Number 1
5. philips Number 1
6. postbus51 Number 1
7. rabobank Number 1
8. vrom Number 1
9. wehkamp Number 1
10. wnf Number 1

The same for Bing:

1. bol Number 1
2. funda Number 1
3. helenahoeve Number 3 and 4, number 1 is helenahoeve.hyves.nl
4. nu Number 1
5. philips Number 1
6. postbus51 Number 1
7. rabobank Number 1
8. vrom Number 1
9. wehkamp Number 1
10. wnf Number 1

Last but not least. Yahoo!

1. bol Number 1
2. funda Number 1
3. helenahoeve Not on the first page
4. nu Not on the first page
5. philips Not on the first page, however philips.com (which redirects to philips.nl) is at number 1
6. postbus51 Number 1
7. rabobank Number 5, however rabobank.com is at number 1
8. vrom Number 1
9. wehkamp Number 1
10. wnf Number 1

Hmmm, I think I need to contact Bing and Yahoo about these results.