I have at last produced my first video! It is a part of my series of posts about website reviews and uses the same criteria to look at 5 websites.
The big difference is this video looks at 5 sites from 5 similar organisations. My idea is that by comparing similar organisations we can begin to get a better idea about website good practice.
The title is “The 5 Worst Intermediate Body Websites” and there will be a second video with the 5 best. The video explains what an Intermediate Body is but the point is their mistakes are all too common online. Many organisations need to scrap their sites and start over because they have made poor decisions in the past.
This may seem harsh but the benefits of following basic standards of good practice are immense.
Next week I’ll write about how I planned and produced the video. I still have some issues to resolve and so I’ll go into the problems I’ve met and how I’m addressing them.
One issue is the size of the video! I’ve adjusted this so that it fits in the available space. You may find it best to view it on full screen.
It is worth following on by summarising the main points. Bad decisions about your content management system (cms) can create problems as you develop your site. These sites have issues about their content too but there is no point in trying to add good content to sites that are not working. A quick checklist from the video:
- Make sure you have standards of functionality comparable to WordPress. Some of the these cms are lacking basic functionality such as a blog.
- Don’t publish on someone else’s url or use their logo. It is your website and you need to control the content so that your site visitors can see at a glance what you’re about.
- If you have a reasonable cms, make sure your content is good. And do the basics such as proof-reading! I spotted another spelling mistake on the Surrey site after I finished recording. Did you?
- There is no need to fear cascading style sheets. Do fear sites structured by tables or framesets.
- Your visitor does not want to know about the geographical boundaries of your organisation or the vacancies on your committee.
- There are conventions and it pays to follow them. Hiding the navigation is not clever or witty. Put your energy into telling me stuff I didn’t know I wanted to know.
Do tell me what you think! Also tell me if you have any problems viewing the video. I’m not planning to use this system forever and hope to migrate to YouTube soon once I’ve sorted some technical issues.
