Sitemorse Blog

We are in the final stages of testing a new feature for the Sitemorse service that will test the syntax of any JavaScripts we find as we spider through a site.

JavaScript is in increasing use on all types of web sites, ranging from simple rollover
images and form validation scripts, to complex "Web 2.0"-style dynamic AJAX interactive web applications. These scripts are no less susceptible to coding errors and mistakes than the HTML code that makes up the rest of the web pages they appear on.

Up until now, there has been no way of automatically checking a web site for these errors. Sitemorse's new Javascript testing feature examines the Javascript code used on your site, be it "event handlers" processing keypresses and mouse clicks, or in-line or included scripts, and comprehensively examines it all for syntax errors.

Unlike syntax errors in your HTML that a browser might compensate for, these types of errors will prevent your scripts from performing their intended operation - with results ranging from faulty image rollovers, to missing analytics data, to forms that cannot be submitted, to pages whose major functions fail to operate correctly.

We're finalising the report layout of the results at the moment.  There will be a new section to cover JavaScript and the results will be formatted in a similar way to the Code Quality section.

Initially the results wont affect your Overall Score and will therefore not influence your ranking in our surveys.  Once we have the results from across the many hundreds of sites we audit we'll be in a better position to understand when we should look to include them.

We'll keep you posted on the launch date.

Following on from the previous post, looking at responsibility of providers, the twittering at Sitecore was a little frantic - we weren't trying to offer their client services people 'free' re-tweets, but we acknowledge their thanks for the assistance via this tweet from SitecoreUK to Sitemorse: "thx. agency has bn notified". Shame the Chairman was so aggressive and threatening - something to protect or worse, to hide?... a reminder of the email exchange.

We also noticed there were a number of questions around the capability of the CMS to support accessibility - based on their own marketing (http://www.sitecore.net/en/Products/Sitecore-CMS/Sitecore-feature-comparison.aspx) which states (under the "Site Control Tools" section) that they have an accessibility checker, the most basic of needs we would have thought would have been covered - missing "Alt" text for an image - especially on the home page of their international award winner... come on Sitecore, time to be a little more accurate in your products capability - advise clients of the limitations....

Here's the site, www.stokke.com/​en-us/​, that won Sitecore's International Site of the Year award for 2009.  That's quite an accolade !

So I did a quick Sitemorse Snapshot of the site's Home Page and found that the 3 main product images were missing AltTxt (that's a basic Priority 1 (A) Accessibility failure) and there were 3 associated links to separate product info pages which all said "Read more" (so those are all Priority 2 (AA) Accessibility failures (linktarget).  Both these errors are basic and should be identified by any Accessibility checking, which most CMS vendors claim that they do.

Oh, and from a usability point of view the page also has lots of Flash, so that won't look good on the new Apple iPad ! (or in the Opera browser that's used by the Wii and is probably problematic on several other platforms)

Here's the bottom of the page where the errors are

 

Here's a larger version

Back to my point on other blogs on this topic.  Are the people responsible for the site aware of these errors ? Would they be happy if they knew they existed ?  I wouldn't think so.  So perhaps they are under the misapprehension that these types of problems can't exist on their site.

More about Sitemorse at www.sitemorse.com

My blog postings over the last couple of days talking about who needs to take responsibility for the quality of an organisations website seems to have stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest.  Sadly it wasn't the reaction I was aiming for but it does reinforce my message that the only people really looking out for the customer is the CUSTOMER,

Our CEO, Lawrence Shaw, emailed the Chairman of Sitecore directly (after being hit with rather a terse response previously in trying to advise them of matters).  In his email he linked to the blog article about Toshiba's Business Communications Division  http://blog.sitemorse.com/2010/02/who-ends-up-in-court---you-or.html, who are a Sitecore reference site, pointing out why our companies should work together.

We haven't had any joy in engaging with them in the past and although we were expecting anything in the range of "yes, let's meet" to "no thanks".  We did not expect the response we did get.

Here are the two emails firstly from Lawrence and then the response.

 

Lawrence Shaw at Sitemorse [mailto:lshaw@Sitemorse.com]
Sent: 04 February 2010 09:47

Subject: Not the best reference site article Dear Mr Sondergarrd,

I've just noticed this on our blog (below), is was posted after something was bought to our attention that we don't think is either correct, or factual -  your sales team claiming that your CMS wouldn't allow broken links etc & external checking services are of no value.

One of our marketing team has now checked your key clients, and we may end up with with some very unhappy people (internally and at the clients) if they have been given a false sense of security, the findings may not be what they want - its also not about shooting the messenger.

We did meet at Internet World a couple of years ago, I did look to follow-up with yourself but your staff were very dismissive of the need for external testing / verification tools.

Yours sincerely,


Lawrence Shaw
C E O

http://blog.sitemorse.com/2010/02/who-ends-up-in-court---you-or.html

 

And the reply

We have noticed your unauthorized usage of our brand, logo, protected name and trademarks.
The usage not unauthorized by Sitecore and you are instructed to immediate stop using our brand, logo, protected name and trademarks in the marketing of your company.
 
We have asked our lawyers to prepare a lawsuit against you for your slanderous behaviour as well as for your unauthorized usage of our protected intellectual property.
 
Also we noted that thus you have no permission to use Toshibas brand and intellectual property in the marketing of your boutique you are using this in the public room.
We have advised our customer Toshiba and involved web design agency to both seek legal advice and possible take legal action against you immediately with no further warnings.
 
Best regards

Laust Sondergaard
Chairman

 

So, no mention of the fact that the customer has a problem.   No mention about how we might help the customer solve the problem.  No "thanks, we'll get straight on to it".

And what is slanderous about pointing out that two very important links on Toshiba's Home Page categorically don't work ? And the use of their trade name comes about because they have a "Powered by Sitecore" at the bottom of the Toshiba webpage (which I didn't notice when I grabbed the screen).

We also spoke to Toshiba again yesterday and though they were angry about the problems existing in the first place they were NOT annoyed with Sitemorse for finding them.

When I checked again this morning the problems have been solved.

 

It seems to me that this reinforces the message that YOU need to take control and responsibility for ensuring the quality of your Website, you can not rely on the assurances from others.

Access to the Sitemorse Surveys has changed over the years with different levels of access to different people.

A while ago we changed the Public view of the Surveys to be a simple alphabetic listing so that people could easily find themselves in the list, with our coloured blobs showing how well or how poorly the site had performed.  Customers, as always, retained access to the ranked listings so they could see where they were and whether they'd moved up or down the survey rankings.

However, we've found that our Customers not only wanted to see for themselves how they were ranked but were also very keen that everyone else could see how well they were doing in the survey rankings.  So we've decided to change the Public access view of the surveys to show the rankings but to also allow them to sort the list alphabetically so they can find entries easily. (simply click on the column headings)

Hopefully this will satisfy everybody's needs.

 

It's all about who's ACTUALLY responsible for what goes on with YOUR website.  Marketing blurb and SLAs are all very well but how do you actually measure whether your Design Agency actually delivered the error free, accessible and standards compliant website they said they would ?  Or that your new CMS system delivers on the same promise.

And if they don't come up to scratch what are the legal implications for them ?  Well very limited as these things are so difficult to prove - look at he long running (i.e. years and years) between companies and some of the big consultancies regarding failed projects.

But what about if your Home Page has failing links to content that are a legal requirement.  Who ends up in court then ?  Not them.  YOU.

If we take a look at a page we've mentioned before, the Toshiba Telecoms Home Page, we find 2 broken links. But not just any old broken links. The "Terms and Conditions" and the "Privacy Policy" links don't work, which are a bit more of a problem than the normal run-of-the-mill links as these are both legal requirements.

It's no defence to say "but my CMS vendor said this couldn't happen" or "but my Design Agency assured me that the site was perfect".  It wont wash.  At best it's a plea for leniency.

And if it's reported widely in the press - your reputation is in tatters and your brand is damaged.  Who'll bother to use your site when there are plenty of others to choose from ?

How about the internal Web Team ?  Is anyone telling the CIO/CEO that everything is fine with the site and that they are compliant with all the legal requirements placed on organisations with a website ? I suspect they are because I'm sure no one is saying "we're fine apart from these 2 crucial links on our Home Page".

It's time to raise the game and take quality a lot more seriously.  Take responsibility and take control.  Remember the visitors to your website didn't read the marketing blurb or hear the assurances your Design Agency gave you and there is ALWAYS an alternative for them to use.

Oh and it's worth pointing out that the links have been broken since at least the middle of October 2009 when we first spotted them. (that's over THREE months ago)

Take a look at the full size view

Not even a nice friendly Toshiba branded error page apologising for the inconvenience.

We are always coming across comments from prospective customers about the vast capabilities of CMS products,  Mostly it's about how they don't need to use Sitemorse because their CMS produces error free, accessible and standards compliant pages.  Most of us know that that isn't the case and that however good a CMS is there will still be problems to resolve that Sitemorse is ideally suited to help with.

Recently I've seen performance mentioned as something that certain CMS vendors are claiming they can help monitor.  Some CMS vendors (for example, PaperThin and Sitecore) provide built-in reporting capability for determining time-to-render for various content elements.  Now that seems very strange to me.  And the biggest problem I have with the claims is that render times is a small part of the performance of a Webpage and something that is running within your infrastructure can't get a "REAL" picture of what performance an end user of your site is experiencing.  You need to be out there on the internet to experience that.  So for me they could, at best, only tell you a small part of the story - one which if you take a look at the performance of your website from your office PC you'd get the same view.

The reality is that your website visitors don't live in your Data-centre and so aren't sitting with a high speed LAN connection to your Webservers.  They use a variety of technologies to connect to your website all of which can have an influence on THEIR experience of the performance of your website.

Diagram courtesy of Gomez Inc. 

As you can see the further away from your Data-centre (where your CMS is located) the more, potentially dodgy, technologies are used - like mobile devices or dial-up connections -  more issues start to arise with regard to both performance and availability.  So, just as a CMS can't offer you the whole solution to your quality and compliance issues it can't offer you the whole story when it comes to measuring your website's performance.

Who told the Hiscox CIO that their website was OK ?

This is a theme we touch on a lot in our conversations with customers, the press and in our blog.  There are things we find through our testing that are clearly unacceptable yet they exist on the websites of organisations and they are there each time we test the sites, not just an unlucky one-off.

So in Hiscox's case we find that their Accessibility Webpage on which they say they are going to work with the Shaw Trust to get their site to meet AA compliance.  That's a good thing to be doing it's just that on this page the main navigation buttons across the top of the page are images and 3 of the 5 don't have AltTxt defined so even on their Accessibility page they fail the most basic of the Accessibility guidelines.  I just can't imagine that anyone with responsibility for the Hiscox website would find these sorts of failings acceptable.  Working with specialist Accessibility organisations like The Shaw Trust is not about solving such simple problems.  That would be a shameful waste of money and the specialist skills of the Shaw Trust consultants.

So why does this situation arise ?  Is this 'accessibility' page simply paying lip service to a legal requirement, are the company kidding themselves or are they being told lies by those testing the site ?  When discussions with the in-house web team or the external design agency take place are either of these groups explaining the exact state of the quality of the website ?  (And, yes, let's broaden it out beyond just accessibility now as we find in our surveys that sites that score low on one category, say Accessibility, of our tests often also score low under our Function and Code Quality categories as well.)

I would doubt that any real, tangible information is disclosed and in its place are mere platitudes and generalities that are intended to placate those asking the questions (assuming that the questions are asked, of course)

So in place of relying on this I'd suggest that regular reports that independently assess and report on the quality of an organisations web estate is the only viable way for those responsible to really know what's going on.

 

The image below shows the Sitemorse Instant Snapshot view of the page showing Accessibility issues by drawing blue boxes around the problems.  The hover box tells you that there's a missing AltTxt  (which is true of the 3 middle tabs.  And the black arrow shows where they say they will always have AltTxt)  The other blue boxes mostly relate to the use of Deprecated code.

 

View  full size image

We're not targeting Hiscox in any malicious way, it's just the irony of having such blatant Accessibility issues on their Accessibility page.  If we take a look at a page we've mentioned before, the Toshiba Telecoms Home Page, we find 2 broken links.  But not just any old broken links.  The "Terms and Conditions" and the "Privacy Policy" links don't work, which is a bit more of a problem than the normal run-of-the-mill links as these are both legal requirements.

 

Again is anyone telling the CIO/CEO that everything is fine with the site and that they are compliant with all the legal requirements placed on organisations with a website ?  I suspect they are because I'm sure no one is saying "we're fine apart from these 2 crucial links on our Home Page".

 

Oh and it's worth pointing out that they've been broken since at least the middle of October 2009 when we spotted them. (that's over THREE months ago)

 

 

Take a look at the full size view

Further to my pointers about how to improve the performance and quality of your website and my blogs on Google's musings about a website's speed affecting it's rankings I thought a few more pointers about things to consider when looking at improving the speed of your Webpages might be helpful.

Reduce File Sizes

You can find out the sizes of your files by looking at the "Site Inventory" page in your Sitemorse Audits or looking at the "Page assets" info of a SnapShot report and see the impact on performance by looking at the "Performance" info.

Use a HTML Compression tool

There are multiple methods of reducing the time it takes to send a file from the server to the client. Gzip is a compression tool used on servers to compress files in order to save those precious kilobytes. It is the most popular and effective compression method at this time, reducing the response size by about 70%. It can be used to reduce the size of any type of file, however as images and pdf files are already compressed, it is typically best not to attempt to compress these with gzip as there may be loss of quality and can potentially increase file sizes.

Don't Scale Images In HTML

Just because you can set the width and height of an image in HTML does not mean you should! If you want to display an image that is 100px wide and 100px high, then the image should be 100×100px rather than a scaled down 500×500px image! This will reduce the size of the image therefore make it load faster.

Optimise your CSS and JavaScript

Removing unnecessary code from JavaScript and style sheet files will reduce the file size, thereby improving load times. Minification takes this a step further by removing all comments, new lines, tabs and spaces. This improves response time as the size of the downloaded file is reduced drastically. A popular tool for minifying JavaScript code and CSS is YUI compressor.

Reduce Server Calls

You can find out the number of CSS and JavaScript files by looking at the "Site Inventory" page in your Sitemorse Audits or how many are on a particular page by looking at the "Page assets" info of a SnapShot report.

Combining style sheets (and JavaScript files for that matter) into as few files as possible will reduce the number of calls being made to the server. Combining files is more challenging when the style sheets and scripts vary from page to page, but the improvement in response times makes it well worth the effort.

CSS Sprites combine background images into a single image, reducing the number of image requests, and using CSS can show only the parts as desired using the background-image and background-position properties.

Script Locations

You can find out the sequence of how files are loaded by looking at the "Performance" info of a SnapShot report as well as seeing the impact they have on the page's load times.

Where you import your CSS and JavaScript can make a huge difference on how long a page takes to load, and how long it appears to take.

CSS At the Top

Moving style sheets to the HEAD makes pages appear to be loading faster as the page will render progressively. Not only is this stated in the HTML specifications, but by placing them near the bottom of the document, many browsers will be unable to render the page correctly as these browsers block rendering to avoid having to redraw elements of the page if their styles change.

JavaScript At The Bottom

Browsers are able to download from multiple sources at the same time (usually two downloads in parallel per host) allowing a page to load a smidgen faster. The problem with JavaScript is that they block these parallel downloads. Moving them to the bottom of the page gives everything else time to load. Sometimes this is impractical as some script may be needed in order to insert content into the page, for example if the script uses document.write. A work-around for this is to create a function at the bottom of the page and use an on-load command, where you want the content, to call a function when the page has finished downloading.

Flush

In PHP the function flush() allows a partially ready HTML response to be sent back to the browser. This is useful while the back-end is putting together the rest of the HTML page and is most noticeable on busy back-ends, where a script requires a lot of time to pull together a lot of resources and complete making the page before sending it to the browser. A good place to consider flushing is right after the HEAD as this is usually the easiest part of the page to create and allows the browser to start including any CSS and JavaScript files the browser requires while it waits for the rest of the HTML page, which the back-end is still constructing.

For example:
...<!-css, js->
</head>
<?php flush();?>
<body>
...<!-content->

Here's an article I picked up on from Lawrence Jones in businesscomputingworld.co.uk on 20th Jan 2010. It reinforces the stuff that's been coming out of Google recently which I blogged on "Does speed affect your website" and my blog on improving the speed of your web pages and how Sitemorse can help you.

Speed was identified as a key factor in Search Engine Optimisation for 2010 at a recent round table discussion in Manchester.

Confirming Google's recent findings that there is a direct correlation between Web site speed and business results, the panel of industry experts identified the speed at which Web site content is delivered as an increasing factor in improving user experiences.

I think it is a given that content is very important but now it is about the delivery of that content. I think Google is putting it higher up the search engine in its priorities and as far as I'm concerned it is about location, location, location - where the server is located and how ISPs can deliver that packet of information faster than anyone else.

Following on from Google's Matt Cutts' comments at the PubCon 2009 event, page load time was identified as an increasing concern in relation to Google's potentially changing priorities in 2010. With speed already a factor in the AdWords quality score and Google's increasing focus on it in relation to Chrome and Caffeine, faster Web sites were thought to be a future rankings winner.

Panelist and commercial director of High Position Terry Heffernan agreed: "By talking to our technical teams certainly we see that speed is going to be more important and it could be a window of opportunity."Speed is one of the elements of SEO but it is about fine-tuning the whole machine to deliver the best performance."

In addition to the speed at which content was accessed, the quality of the content itself was also credited as an essential SEO factor by the panel, which included Craig Stone from CSI Media, Tom Cheesewright, strategy director of And Digital, and Matt Rycroft, technical director of Oomagoo.

The use of social-networking and displaying richer, more varied content across a variety of channels was also thought to optimise business results and search rankings. Adopting a combined approach by using Twitter feeds, blog posts, press releases and video content was encouraged to achieve the ultimate universal search effect with links aiding customer flow.

Fundamentally, identifying and educating clients to understand that SEO is not simply a one-stop-shop but requires a multiple approach over time was collectively agreed to be the most effective way of climbing the Google rankings in 2010

Performance

A survey conducted by Forrester Consulting to examine eCommerce web site performance and its correlation with an on-line shopper's behaviour. The most compelling results reveal that two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average on-line shopper's expectation for a web page to load and 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site.

Additional findings indicate that quick page loading is a key factor in a consumer's loyalty to an eCommerce site, especially for high spenders. 79 percent of on-line shoppers who experience a dissatisfying visit are less likely to buy from the same site again while 27 percent are less likely to buy from the same site's physical store, suggesting that the impact of a bad on-line experience will reach beyond the web and can result in lost store sales.  52 percent of on-line shoppers stated that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty.

"Today's consumers demand a fast, engaging and secure on-line shopping environment when searching for a product on-line. We see a direct relationship between on-line revenues and site performance and therefore, we have to ensure our site performs well and loads fast" said Michael Cooper, Vice President and General Manager, HomeDepot.com

The Forrester study also states that usability, site content and speed are key factors to on-line customer loyalty. By taking the time to improve the overall site content and functionality, retailers can bolster the overall brand and image of their company. For example, adding rich, interactive and dynamic content to a retail site can help reflect the in-store experience for the consumer, which can lead to increased satisfaction and loyalty from the consumer.

For pointers on how to improve your Website's performance read http://blog.sitemorse.com/2009/10/its-about-more-than-just-cpu-c.html

To read and download a complimentary copy of the full study, please visit www.akamai.com/2seconds

Website Quality

Missing content (such as images) on a webpage looks amateur and gives a poor impression to visitors of your website.

Broken links can be a disaster for visitor retention. If the link is to an important page on your site, MOST people will abandon your site for one of your competitors immediately. Even links on your site to pages on other websites can cause enough consternation for visitors to quit your site.

Think of it as a vending machine with some of the pictures of the products missing and some of the selection buttons that don't work. If you can't see what's on offer and your first selection doesn't work you'll definitely press the button to get your money back.

Why is Accessibility important ? It's what makes the difference between a disabled person being able to access your site or not. Many sites fail even the most basic Accessibility guidelines. Think of it as a vending machine with lots of pictures of the products but they're small and some are high up so they're difficult to see by short-sighted people or short people, like children. The machine has a great feature to help. If you touch a picture it reads out what the product is. The problem is some picture don't have an associated description and when you touch it the machine just tells you whereabouts inside the machine those things are stored but now what they are.

That's what your website looks like if you don't meet the Accessibility Guidelines

Having Standards compliant code means that whatever the browser technology being used there's an excellent chance that your web pages will look the same regardless. More and more people are using mobile devices to browse the web and these browsers are far less tolerant of poor quality code. It's also a key part of ensuring your site meets Accessibility guidelines.

Everyone knows that if you have email links on your site then you need the internal processes in place to ensure that any emails are responded to within a reasonable amount of time. But how do you know that all the email addresses on your site still work ? Locating and testing them manually would be a huge task. This is clearly a task for an automated tool.

Spelling on a Website is an obvious indictor of the "quality" of your website and silly mistakes can give a very bad impression with people thinking the site is "sloppy".

The consistent use of brand names and phrases is also very important and being able to stipulate and check just how these terms appear on the site is crucial to the maintenance of your brand identity.

How do you know how good or bad you are ?

Whenever a big site launches a new version or, indeed, a whole new site, there's always lots of FIZZ around extolling the virtues of the new design / new capabilities / new customer features.  There's lots of talk about the increased visitor numbers / better conversion rates and the subsequent positive impact on the bottom line.

And, of course, to increase the impact of all this fizz companies roll out the big guns to present all this good news.  That means CEOs, Marketing Directors etc are making lots of claims about the "top draw capabilities and compliance" of the site that they probably haven't fully substantiated. 

When building websites, some of the people involved with their production can lack the necessary understanding of the issues that can be created if there is a lack of adherence to standards and poor quality control.  Or they may feel there just isn't enough time allocated for the due diligence necessary. How can the CEO be confident about the claims they are asked to make ?

And if all this is being done by an outside agency then things are one step removed.  Whereas a CEO may have a good working relationship with their Head of Web / CIO and "trusts" their assurances that the Website is superb, but does this trust extend to the agency that the CIO chose ?  Even though there is a clear commercial divide between the two organisations people often accept the assurances of external agencies that they have delivered on their promises of performance, compliance and quality.  They often do this for the simple reason that they have no way to prove or disprove their claims.

Sitemorse will help ensure that you have a High Performance, High Quality retail Website