The following list spells out a few things that webmasters should be on top of.
Site Structure
When thinking about site structure, several bullet points come to mind -- Intrasite Link Structure
- Regardless of whether or not you are concerned about search engine optimization, consider link structure in terms of:
- how many clicks will it take a person to reach any given point on your website
- Are your important pages prominent within the link structure
- Are your index pages useful?
- Are your URL's guessable?
- Mixed Foundation
- If your site is a mashup of various software implementations, how do those stylings intermingle? What about the back end - user database, discussion system, etc.? Additionally, is the integration seemless to the end user? Are the navigation elements intuitive throughout your site?
- Error Messages
- You really should always have a custom 404 page, but in terms of all errors on the site - how exactly are they presented to the end user and is the average end user capable of dealing with those potential errors?
- Search Functionality
- Is it obvious what the search options are? Are the result sets segmented between site sections? Are there multiple search interfaces? Can you reach one search interface from another? Combine result sets from multiple interfaces?
- Performance
- In terms of site structure, the important factor in regards to performance is consistency of expected performance levels -not just between dynamic and static sections of your site, but in terms of the ability of your server side components to deal with peak traffic loads and deliver an end user experience consistent with non-peak traffic times.
Performance
I'm always going on about performance, and I won't go into details of how to accomplish anything here, but in regards to performance - consider response times in the following areas:- Server Response Time
- Page Load Time
- Database Load
- Caching efficiency - programmatic and OS Level
- Appropriation of functionality
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Just a few thoughts here for now, but I expect that I'll update this list over time and re-link to the article at a later date. Feel free to add your own.
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