Sitescore

Probably nothing new to many developers and indeed I'm pretty sure I've seen sites with the little icon on before, but today I got pointed at Silktide's Sitescore properly. It's pretty cool. The site allows you to enter the URL of your website and it'll then give you back a report and score to let you know how 'good' your website is. The tests cover marketing, design, accessibility, experience and a visitor rating system. I put this site through the tests and it came out with an overall rating of 7.8 to start with as I had a couple of HTML validation errors (mostly to do with the Amazon/flickr links), but after a couple of minutes tracking down un-encoded ampersands and erroneous border attributes my Accessibility rating went from 6.2 to 10.0. With my Sitescore now up to 8.5 it's obviously worth sticking the little icon on my site (bit of ego-stroking for me and the free linkage for Silktide). The only thing really keeping me under a 9+ rating seems to be that not enough people link to this site, but I knew that without Sitescore telling me. This tool is an excellent example of a company gaining some good PR by providing a free service to not only potential clients but to potential competitors too. The tool is extremely useful to other web developers. Yes, it's mainly just reading in data from other tools such as the W3C Validator, but we all love a good tool that consolidates a number of other related tools into one. People are lazy like that. By having the rating icon for sites that get above a 7.0 to display their skills to the world, it also gets other developers (and therefore competitors) to give Silktide some free advertising, as the buttons link back to the Sitescore (Silktide) website. This is fine by me and a rather sensible way of doing things. They could have charged for the tool, but by making it free and encouraging the use of the buttons on rated websites, they get free advertising and kudos from the community (I'm writing this aren't I?). My only niggle is that my button still seems to be showing 7.8 - I just made changes and got an 8.5 damnit! I'm sure it'll update eventually though... How ironic can you get? Adding the code for the Sitescore button invalidated the code and dropped the score back down. Should be fixed now.