Methods to Help Evaluate Your Web Site

Community networks are designed for ease of use by the user. When designing or revising your community networking site, users' needs must be considered. There are various methods to ensure you know what your community needs. This is not only a requirement in the original design but should be an ongoing mission because communities are dynamic entities and your website should evolve with your community and its needs. There should be a periodic review of the site to ensure that it continues to fulfill its mission.

Always keep your community network's goals in mind. If you need to, display them prominently. What are you trying to communicate to your audience? Who is your intended audience? What questions will these people have for your site? Which of these questions can you answer? How difficult is it to maintain your site? If it were to be deleted from the server tomorrow, would you be able to reconstruct it?

There are a variety of the site's aspects to be evaluated:

• functionality: is it supporting both your goals and the needs of the community;
• usability: can the user find what he is looking for;
• learnability: how easily can the user use your site the first time it is visited;
• look and feel: can the user look at the page and get the information from the page easily or does she have to work at it; and
• if this is an established web site, what the anticipated impact of the changes you want to make will be.

There are a variety of audiences which can benefit from a site evaluation. The most obvious audience of the web site are the external users to your site. The internal users' needs should also be taken into consideration. These include the manager and maintainers of the site.

The first thing that should be done is to determine the depth of your evaluation. For the initial implementation, or if there are major changes being made, it should be very deep. If the site is less in a state of flux, the evaluation can be less thorough. Other factors in this decision include:

• how much time do I have to do this anaylsis, and
• how much is it going to cost.
  

Keep usage logs. Keeping usage logs of your community network is one of the easiest and most effortless methods to use. Most server software has this functionality. There are various software packages which will analyze the data for you.

Look at other sites. Comparative evaluation of other sites is also important. Determine criteria for the more important aspects of your site and go look at other community networks. How are they doing it? Could you adopt those methods?

Talk to people. Don't forget that you also need to ease the burden on those who maintain the site. The easiest way to find out what they need is to ask them. The user base is most likely too large and widespread for this to be effective for that audience.

Watch people. When a person repeats a task frequently, they tend to stop realizing exactly what it is they are doing. An hour watching the site maintainer may reveal flaws in the process that he/she does not realize exist.

Conduct a survey. This can be online at the site or on paper distributed throughout the community, depending on the time and money you have to conduct it. These are time consuming and often difficult to do well, but can provide a wealth of information about what people want to see at your community network.

Run a focus group. These act as mass interviews and are another good way to get information from your user population about what they want and what they like about your community network. This can also serve in the developmental stages; you can get feedback about a design before it is released to the public.

Get real users. Ultimately, you can run usability tests on your site. This involves setting a certain tasks and asking typical users of your site to perform these tasks, while you time how long it takes and analyze the mistakes which get made.

There are a variety of questions to keep in mind when composing or changing a web site. The methods listed above will assist you in determining if you have reached your goals. Remember to keep in mind that you are serving the community. In order to ensure this is happenning, evaluation of your site is necessary.