12 thoughts on “Silktide SiteScore”

  1. hmmm…interesting, but flawed. e.g. the analysis of my site, which scored 7.7:

    – number of images: looks like it only looks for IMG elements, and doesn’t count the use of background graphics via CSS

    – use of meta tags: i have quite a few meta tags in my pages, just not the useless “keywords” one – but the tool didn’t see them

    – use of forms: i don’t need a form on my site, so scoring me down for not having a form is ludicrous…and a form is not a sign of “interactivity”, and not the only measure of how “engaging” a site is.

    so all in all, cute…but ultimately useless without manual checks (as with all automated tools).

  2. Yup, it’s always hard to judge something like “design” or experience through something automated. No doubt about it that the thing might not be quite accurate (I knew the minute I saw that my site, with it’s basic simple “design”, scored higher than other brilliantly designed ones (e.g. Joel’s Blog)… ;-)

  3. Hi there, in answer to your comments… SiteScore is extremely intelligent, we have spent along time researching and testing it aswell as creating it. Through trial and error we have refined the way in which it scores. We will be adding the image CSS issue soon but as for meta tags, it does check your meta tags, the google harvester for example, checks your keywords in your page and compares them to the keywords in your meta tag to see if they are relevant.

    We feel that forms do add interactivity to a site, either a search box, contact form or a ‘leave a comment’ box like this is.

    Most of the tests effect more than 1 category too, without giving too much away – a form on a webpage may be concidered as a good design aspect. As for design, we can’t literally scan the page and have someone sit in the corner and give it a score out of 10! Instead, we perform several checks on the page content, to see if you follow the rules of basic web design. One of these is basic tag inclusion, another is CSS – things like that.

    We are constantly tweaking the tool and adding more tests when we can, so any suggestions are welcomed.

    Cheers.

  4. Wow. Lo there James, I didn’t think anyone from SiteScore would actually look out for comments. I believe that you made a real good effort to come up with criteria to really decide what is good/not so good/bad, and I’m looking forward to improvements you might implement (e.g. the css-image thing, etc), but as I said: something like design is always hard to judge (okay you can check for basic stuff like: proper use of tags, no nesting errors, etc etc, but bottom line is: design as an creative artform is more or less subjective in a way) – nontheless your tool is a real handy tool which might help ppl to improve their design and that’s why Archbob, one of our Mentors, posted it over at SitePoint where I and many others found it…

  5. Update: my SiteScore dropped to 8.4 (why? I don’t know, maybe the algo was tweaked?)…on that matter: it would be good if the link you can post on your site was dynamic (atm it is fixed…so my site was still showing the 8.5 button, but it’s score is now 8.4): so, suggestion for improvement: make link dynamic (e.g. link to the image (ss_8_5 or what not) should be replaced by a dynamic link which reads the score from the db and that’s that)!

  6. Yes, I agree, design is hard to judge but isn’t it hard to judge by eye anyway? – its all a matter of opinion ;) That’s why we are developing a user ratings system, where users can rate other peoples websites, hopefully that will seperate the visually impressive to the boring but well designed : )

    your site may have dropped to 8.3 for a number of reasons, we are constantly changing the algorithms as you say and adding more tests here and there which effect the score. Soon we will be implementing an automatic update system which goes through all of the websites in our database and scores them – replacing their old score with an updated score. I’m sure if you read the report your website recieves – you can climb back up.

    As far as the dynamic image goes, we are working on that too, i’ll let you know when the new code is available – first we need to sort out some more bugs : (

    Any more questions, please don’t hesitate to ask,

    Cheers

    (Sorry about the spelling mistakes, if any, i’m typing at the speed of light!)

  7. Indeed…like I said: design is a matter of opinion, but it’s fair if all sites are judged by the same criteria.

    Alrighty…I’ll check out my new report and edit the pic/link if necessary (yet again) – really looking forward to a dynamic update… :-)

    About the typos: my own motto is: find them – keep ’em ;-)

  8. Thanks for your support :) nice site you got here by the way, I had a little read on my lunch break.

  9. Thanks for the feedback – as James says we’re always working to improve Sitescore at a furious rate of knots!

    We’ve just added a new test which scans a website for content, keywords, titles etc and then searches for all of them on Google. We’re using it to find what Google-searches a website scores highly for (often not what you’d think).

    Anyway you can try it for free if you like – you’ll need to create a user account and then select “Google-rating test” from the left-hand side.

  10. Lo there Oliver. Yup…and as my “marketing” is getting better my marketing score improved and hence my total score, which is a 8.7 now…Thumbs up!

    Now all I would love to see is the dynamic link to the rating-pic (if you rating changes the pic changes without the need to edit your template (or to be precise: the link to the rating-pic)).

    I’ll check your new google test out later as I’m pretty busy atm. Thanks for the hint though :-)

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