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: