Webtelligence WSI Webscan
WSI WebScan
Exclusive to WSI, WebScan can identify the strengths and weaknesses of any site and advise how to improve them. Because WebScan can analyse any website, you can use it to improve your own, and to evaluate and learn from your competitors.
Is Your Website Working For Your Business?
Do you know what is working and what is not working?
Have You Updated Your Website Recently?
Have You Had a Competitive Analysis of Your Website?
If you answered “no” to any of these questions
request your FREE WSI Webscan, our website performance testing software.
What is WebScan?
WebScan is a unique tool for analysing and improving websites. Exclusive to WSI, WebScan can identify the strengths and weaknesses of any site and advise how to improve them.
Because WebScan can analyse any website, you can use it to improve your own, and to evaluate and learn from your competitors.
What can it do for me?
Is your website performing as well as it should? Do you understand the technical and design reasons why? WebScan can help.
In particular, if you’re looking to bring more visitors to your site, appear higher in Google for competitive searches and increase your conversion rates, WebScan delivers high value to you at a fixed, low cost.
The automated nature of the tests means you can analyse many websites regularly and cost effectively. If you frequently update your website, monthly reports are an excellent option for maintaining high quality and evaluating your ongoing position relative to your competitors.
What does it test?
Individual tests cover many areas, including spelling, broken links, speed, optimisation of keywords and much more – over 30 tests in total.
Results are summarised into 5 areas
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Search - how well optimised the website is for search engines like Google and Yahoo
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Content -how well written the content is
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Quality -how well built the website is
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Accessibility -how accessible the website is to users with disabilities
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Site -overall, how good the website is
What do I get?
You can request a one off report of any website absolutely FREE, or you can choose to include other websites and compare them for a FEE.
You can test as many websites as you like, as often as you like. If your website changes often, we strongly recommend monthly reports.
A complete one off report includes over 30 individual tests (see sidebar). We also include a guide to understanding your report.
Your report can be printed out for you to read, or you can explore it online. If you view your report online, you can search through results and export them into popular file formats, such as Microsoft Word®, Excel® and HTML. If you have multiple reports, you can also compare them side-by-side online.
Actionable Insights
Although a WebScan report is designed to be as easy to understand as possible, some of the tests may highlight a technical problem that could be confusing. We can help you understand what these are, what they mean to you and what you can do about them.
We can also advise you on the best way of moving forward from any situation – whether it be catching up with competitors, or strengthening your current position. As a WSI Internet Consultant, we’re able to help you with every aspect of your website needs.
What do I do next?
You need to provide us with the web addresses for any sites you wish to test. If for some reason you only want to test part of a website let us know.
We also need to work out the ‘keywords’ that your website is aiming to score highly for in Google and other search engines. We recommend you choose 10 - 20 of these – if you need a hand, we can help.
We then need to setup and run your reports. Some websites can be better ‘behaved’ than others, and make take longer for us to configure the first time.
Depending on what you’ve chosen to buy, we can add commentary to the reports, before printing and/or emailing them to you. We’ll include instructions on how to login to view your online reports, and how to use your online reports.
Once you’ve reviewed your report, you may have questions, or just want advise on what you can do next. We’re here to help.
Detail on all the areas tested
The summary gives you a brief overview of how good or bad the website is as a whole. This includes a screenshot, five Summary scores (Accessibility, Content, Search, Quality and Site), a bullet-point summary of key good and bad points, a list of all tests and what they scored.
The tests include the following areas:
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Accessibility |
How accessible a website is to everyone – in particular users with any form of disability (e.g. dyslexia, colour blindness) or using less common means of accessing a website, such as a mobile phone. Accessible websites can be used by more users, are a legal requirement in many countries and are widely considered best practice. |
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Analytics |
A type of software for analysing the behaviour of visitors to a website. WebScan looks for modern Analytics tools which deliver full detail on user experience (such as Clicktracks, WebTrends, or Google Analytics). Using a proper Analytics tool is essential for any website if you wish to understand how people are using it. |
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Alternative text |
It is possible for non-text content in a web page to have an ‘alternative text’ equivalent. For example, an image or video might have a text description. Although this text is invisible to the vast majority of web users, it is important: Alternative text can be seen by search engines such as Google, and images and video cannot. Similarly, users with disabilities may be unable to see images, and rely on Alternative text to understand this content. See also Accessibility. |
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Broken link |
A link which when clicked upon doesn’t do what you would expect – most often, a error appears like “Unable to find this page” |
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Cookies |
A type of technology used to track users visiting a website. Although sometimes essential (especially for e-commerce sites and login areas), some users will block cookies and search engines cannot use them, so it is important that websites work without them. |
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CSS |
CSS is an extremely common form of technology used to format webpages. Using CSS makes webpages smaller, faster, better optimised for search engines and more accessible. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. |
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Domain name |
The part of a web address that you buy to hold a website, e.g. www.google.com. All other pages in your website are just extensions of the domain name, e.g. www.google.com/news |
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Flash |
A very common technology used to display animations on a website. Almost all non-trivial animation on the web is powered by Flash, including the majority of video. Flash comes in different versions which not all computers support, so it is important that websites handle this correctly. |
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Incoming link |
A link into your website, from another website, often valuable – see SEO. |
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Keywords |
Something that someone would search for in a search engine, “key-words”. It is common practice to consider what keywords a website should score highly for (e.g. “car insurance”) and then optimise a website for them. |
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Metadata / Meta-tags |
Literally “data about data” – usually information about a web page. Metadata is important because webpages can provide information about themselves which search engines use to understand that page. For example, the text that appears in Google underneath the name for your website. |
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Outgoing link |
A link from your website to another website. |
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Popup |
A window which opens automatically when you view a page, hence “pop-up”. These are widely considered an extreme annoyance and over 70% of web users block them, meaning websites which use them will have that content ignored 70% of the time. |
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Printability |
How well webpages appear when printed. It is possible to write webpages so that they appear different when printed – it is best practice to use this technique to fit the printed page, and hide unnecessary parts of the page (such as menus). Many users print webpages to pass them to other people, especially for meetings or recommendations. |
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Readability |
How easy content is to read and understand. |
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Search Engine |
A website used to search the Internet – most commonly Google, Yahoo and MSN. |
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SEO |
Search Engine Optimisation. The process of improving a website so that it appears higher in search engine results. Correctly used, SEO is usually the best way of increasing qualified visits to a website. |
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Spiderability |
Whether search engines can see the content in this website. The process of exploring a website for content is known as ‘spidering’, hence ‘spider-ability’. Spiderability is utterly essential for websites that wish to score highly in search engines. |
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Stylesheets |
See CSS. |
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URL |
A web address, e.g. www.google.com. Stands for Uniform Resource Locator. |
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URL chopping |
Chopping the end off a URL (web address) to try to go ‘up one level’ in a website. For example, chopping www.example.com/news/article1 to www.example.com/news. Users and search engines do this, yet some sites crash or reveal sensitive information when they do. |
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URL format |
How well formatted the URLs (web addresses) in a website are - in particular whether human beings could understand or memorise them. Bad URLs are harder to market and sometimes even ignored by search engines – see SEO. |
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W3C Compliance |
W3C is the standards body for the Internet, and they define how web pages should be written for maximum compatibility. W3C Compliance is an evaluation of how well a website fits these standards, meaning the website was usually written to a high standard |