Any errors or issues you find that you cannot address, please bring to the attention of the Web team at cofawebmaster@austin.utexas.edu.
On this page:
Double Check Basics
- the site for accuracy,
- correct grammar and spelling,
- consistent voice and tone,
- use of the brand and style guides for the university, college and department, and
- that it follows best writing for the Web practices.
Learn from Analytics
If you are a website content editor you should be receiving a monthly report from Looker Studio with data analytics about your website/s, in your email inbox. If you are not, please let us know. The report will help you understand how website visitors use and engage with your site. Use it to make sure your visitors are getting what you want them to get from visiting your site and to seek improvement opportunities. Learn more on the Analytics & Visitor Data page.
Usability
Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design article provides common sense tips for checking the usability of the website. Such as, “The design should speak the users’ language. ” and “Minimize the user’s memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another.”Review your web content while considering the important points in this article.
Usability Testing
It’s important for you to get feedback from visitors to your site. If there’s something that you want people to “get” or accomplish when visiting your site, ask a friend or family member to give it a try. If you want to get a bit more formal you can perform usability tests. Basically, you ask several people to try to accomplish several tasks on your site while you watch and they talk out-loud through their process. Watch this 24 minute video of Steve Krug demonstrating a usability test.
Responsiveness to All Devices
We need to deliver page layouts that are consistently perceivable, operable, understandable and robust across devices, browsers and window sizes. Check out your site with a browser emulator https://turbo.net/browsers or a mobile device emulator https://mobiletest.me/. You can use https://caniuse.com/ to see if the code used to build a website will work on different browsers or devices. Learn more about how to Respond to a Variety of Devices.
Interaction Design
Follow best practices from Google’s Material Design Blog.“Material is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design…” They even have a Web designer application called Google Web Designer.
Navigation and Information Architecture
Navigation and information architecture are an important part of having a usable site. You may want to perform a card sorting activity to discover issues with your navigation, menus, links or labeling and to discover opportunities to improve how your visitors navigate your website.
Readability
The website, The Readability Test Tool allows you to enter a URL Web address and will take the text and give a score based on the most used readability indicators.
Broken Links
The W3C or World Wide Web Consortium is the group that writes the standards for coding websites. They provide a tool to check for broken links, https://validator.w3.org/checklink. Review Google Analytics to see where people, who end up with a Page Not Found error, came from.
Accessibility
Wave https://wave.webaim.org/ is an online accessibility validation tool. Automated tools, such as Wave, are not able to test all accessibility issues but they can tell you if basic errors, like missing alternate text, are detected. Review the site with these Easy Checks. Additional testing guidance is available from WebAIM and the W3C.
Color and contrast
When you’re picking out colors to use on your website make sure that the contrast is high enough for most people. WebAIM has a color contrast checker and a link color contrast checker. Chrome Lens is a free add-on for the Chrome browser that allows you to view a webpage as a user with a visual impairment.
Page Load Time
Google provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights that will let you know how well your page will load on mobile or desktop devices. Learn more about Optimization improvement opportunities.
Coding
Even if you do not know HTML, you can inspect the code and infer some of the meaning and even do basic troubleshooting. Understanding some basic website coding can be very helpful. To access the code in Drupal click the “Source” button, in WordPress click the “Text” tab. Code inspection is extremely helpful to troubleshoot and also to make design requests.
More advanced code inspection can be done in the browser by viewing the source of the page. In most browsers you can find a link to View Page Source in the right-click context menu. To advance your skills we recommend Learning Chrome Web Developer Tools training on LinkedIn Learning. (You can skip the part about “setting up your environment” in the Introduction and you’ll learn all the really useful stuff by the end of section “3. Using the Elements Panel”.)
Validation
The W3C has a validation tool that you can run any website through and quickly see if there are validation issues with the code, https://validator.w3.org/.
Security
For the college sites the Web team will have already sent them to the university Information Security office for review. For other sites simply send an email to security@utexas.edu asking for an assessment.
Learn More
For a pretty complete list of tools from the W3C visit, https://www.w3.org/developers/tools/.The developer website, Sitepoint has an excellent article, The Ultimate Testing Checklist.
