Oil IT Journal’s website, oilit.com won a free site analysis from Maxamine as part of a promotional effort from Maximine’s patron, EDS. Maxamine analyzes websites in a straightforward, hands-off manner and evaluates site structure—particularly how easily a site can be accessed and maintained, potential pitfalls of compliance and risk issues and accessibility.
Content
Maxamine analyzes the three components of a site—traffic, structure and content—either from a scan of the public website—or possibly offline for corporate sites. The starting point of the analysis is a web map—which can be overlain with traffic analyses—from httpd logs or other sources. A range of customizable reports can then be run on the site to investigate metrics such as accessibility, company ‘image’, search engine optimization and link integrity.
Good news
First the good news. OilIT.com scored well—a 65% overall rating put us bang in the middle of the 100 corporate and government sites Maxamine uses as a benchmark. Oil IT.com scored best in page ‘weight’—a measure of download speed. We didn’t do too bad on link integrity—the site is regenerated programmatically every month, so we have had time to work on such issues.
Bad news
We didn’t do so good on redundant file control—one of those things that you mean to fix but never get around to. And to our shame, we scored zero on search meta data coverage and accessibility.
Was it worth it?
A lot (but not all) of what Maxamine does could be done fairly easily with standard site management tools—but there is a big difference between ‘quite easily’ and actually doing it. Maxamine scores with a low-maintenance (and quite low cost—around $1,500 for a one-off, but less if you contract with them) and high quality ‘in-your-face’ analysis of your web site—warts and all. Maxamine’s presentation makes it easy to see where things are going wrong—and where to concentrate limited development resources to maximum effect.