LO5: Evaluation

There was only one improvement that came up in the answers to my survey. This was that, on the homepage, one of the images for a product did not look the same as the other two images there. This is the image that was spoken about:

The middle image in this set of three is a different colour that the other ones, and it stands out. To me it makes the site seem a little less professional as it shows that the images were clearly not taken on the same day, or in the same location. However, the photographs that I used for my products were taken directly from the Small Machines site, and the Pimoroni store page. This means that they were taken by two different groups of people. To improve upon this I would get myself a set of the products from Small Machines and take my own photographs in an enclosed environment so that they all looked similar. I could have also used a program such as Photoshop to change the colours and saturation of the middle image in order to make it fit in with the other two.

Another possible improvement for me would be the load times of the pages. For this part I am mainly talking about my homepage. This is because, on the homepage, there are a lot of image and widgets that will greatly increase the load times of that page. Another example of a page with a lot of images would be the main products page. To reduce the load times, I could attempt to cut down on the amount of widgets that I have on the homepage, or even reduce the number of images on that page. This would mean that the client has to load less and, in turn, would reduce the time taken for the pages to load.

I would also like to go through my site and make sure that there isn't any one piece of information that is repeated multiple times, so that the user does not have to read the same text multiple times. An example of this is the About Us section on the homepage and the About Us page. There is some information there that I believe did not need to be repeated and, if I were to edit the site further, would remove from either of these two areas of the site to make it less repetitive.

Finally, I would like to remove the number of links on the homepage that link to the same places. For example, I have at least 3 links that all go to the products page of the site. This would help reduce the load times of the main homepage as there would be fewer links to other parts of the site that need to be loaded.

LO4: User Testing

I gave a short test to a few different users who used a multitude of different Operating Systems and Web Browsers. This test covered basic website navigation and external links, page load times and the consistency of my house style. Here are the results:

Navigation

To test the navigation of my website I asked the users to try and reach different pages of my website by using the navigational tools provided to them on the site. This allowed me to test if all of my internal and external hyperlinks worked and if the site was simple to navigate for a new user. 

Internal and External Hyperlinks

To test the internal and external hyperlinks on my website I included a test for all of the different internal and external links. This made sure that every individual link was test across the website and ensured that there were no hyperlinks that didn't work or linked to incorrect pages.

Page Load Times

In order to test the load times of pages on my site I asked the users to give a general response on the page load times. This was part of the user testing and was a simple question of if the users experienced any load times that they considered too long. I then made sure that the users were on a variety of different browsers on different operating systems and devices to check if the load times were consistent across all platforms.

Performance of the Website

Similar to the page load times section I made the users test my site using different operating systems and browsers in order to see if my website performed well. The user then put at the bottom of their testing sheet which operating system and browser that they used.

Consistency of House Style

For a business' website to look professional it needs a consistent house style across all of its pages.

LO4: Technical Testing

To make sure that my site worked, I created a test plan to check each individual part of the my site. This would allow me to find any errors on the website and fix them accordingly. I test my website across multiple different browsers to see if any problems were constant across all browsers, or if the problems were specific to a certain browser. I also tested the website on both a desktop computer and a mobile phone to see if any errors were present on different platforms.

Here is my test plan with the results of my testing:

Something that I did not include in the technical test was the testing of the load times. However, this was very similar across all of the browsers and ranged from around two to four seconds depending on the complexity of the page content. I would like to reduce the load times for my pages, and I will discuss this further in the evaluation of my website.

LO4: User Feedback

To get feedback from users I created a survey on Survey Monkey. Here are the results:

LO4: Feedback Research

For the Small Machines website the age of the target audience is around 30 years old. This is because they will more likely have settled down and will possibly be startign a family and therefore will have children that they would want to buy gifts for. Also they may be brothers of people with children, and they may want to buy things like that for their nephews and nieces. They will have a more stable and well paying job so that they will have the money to pay for the products that are on the site. The gender mix will probably be more males than females as the products on the site would most likely aimed towards men as they are replicas of weapons.

Under 7's:
Basic surveys with simple answer choices so that the children can understand. Pictures of the site.
The survey will most likely be on paper as it will be easier for the children to give their feedback as they are more than likely will not be used to using a computer or other technological devices.

ABC1 Family Parents:
Detailed questonnaires. Enable analytics on the website and get them to test the site for a set period of time. Comment boxes or feedback sheet on the site so that they can leave feedback on the site if they have any complaints or suggestions when they use it. I can use analytics and usability tests to find out how long it takes for them to get from one page to another, or to find a specific thing on the site. This will allow me to see how each navigational feature works on the site while under load from multiple people.

Undergraduate Students:
Questionnaires. Enable analytics on the website and get them to test them. Possibly give them an insentive to test it as they will more than likely need the money. Similar to the ABC1 family parents there will also be the feedback and comment boxes on the site so that they can leave any extra feeback that they find while using the site.

Y11s:
Insentives to fill in the surveys seriously. With somewhat basic questions and answers that get straight to the point of what you want to find out from them. The survery/questionnaires would be either on paper or on the computer as they will be able to fill in both. However, the comouter version will probably be the better option as they can leave mroe detialed feedback as they will have a much larger amount of room to leave their responses.

Analytics
Having analytics on the site will allow me to gather statistics about how the site works while people are testing it. This will allow me to see how each feature of the site works and gain information on things like, visit numbers and durations, visits by location/device and financial statistics so I can track if the shop works on the site. This is the method that I am most likely to use as it will give me live information that I can use to evaluate how well the site works while under load from multiple devices at the same time.

On-site Feedback
The on-site feedback will be a tab on the side of the site that will allow the user to send feedback directly to a database that can be viewed at any time. This will allow the users to give honest feedback quickly if they have any complaints, problems or suggestions to further improve the site.


Surveys
Surveys with questions about different aspects of the site can be sent to small group of people either on paper or through a link to a digital survey that the person can fill in and send straight back for analysis. This means I can get almost instant feedback on specific things from the site, however it does not give the users the freedom to say exactly what they think and might stop getting feedback on other things that are not covered by the survey. This is the method that I am least likely to use as it does not give precise feedback from the users and may therefore not cover some of the things that may be wrong with the site. The other two metods give fas and precise information that can be used to improve the site.

LO3: How I made my website

To make my website I used a service called c9.io. c9.io hosts a WordPress account that you can access all of the individual files from. This allowed me to edit the .css files of the website easily and gave me full customisation over my website. It allowed me to change the colours of individual pieces of the different widgets, as originally they were all different colours that did not match the colour scheme of the site.

Here is a screenshot of the c9.io IDE that allowed me to edit the .css files of the site:

This IDE was really easy to use and gave me access to layers of customisation that I may have never found myself if I was not using this site.

There were also two other ways of editing my site while actually on the WordPress client hosted by c9.io. I could customise the content of the different sections of my homepage using the customise option on WordPress:

I also had access to the WordPress admin page that allowed me to change the settings of all the plugins and themes that I used on my site. This was the main feature that I used as it was where I could add more pages to my site, for blog posts and also for products.

Using these three tools I was able to make my website. I used a starting theme from the WordPress selection, Zerif Lite, and customised it so that it worked with the overall colour scheme of Small Machines.

LO3: My Website

My website is currently hosted on the Wordpress servers through c9.io so that I can easily access it and have full control of the customisation of the site. The c9.io site allows me to access my website whenever I want and on any device using any browser. My site can be located through this link: https://small-machines-site-joshmassey1202.c9users.io/




Here are some screenshots from my website, some of them overlap but they show all of the main pages of my site: