Nibbler now tests what people are saying about your website, and whether they’re happy or sad about it.
If you’re President Obama, say, these figures look pretty good:
If you’re the Prime Minister of England, not so much:
We’ve just made a number of key changes to Nibbler.
This is a little something I’ve been experimenting with in my spare time, and it’s a fun problem. Partly because the answer should be “not in a million years”.
Here’s a colour analysis on one of our own webpages: Nibbler.
On the left is the perceived colour palette, i.e. the colours people notice. This is similar to the most commonly used colours, but with consideration for edges, gradients and other tricks of human perception. For now, you might think of it as ‘magic’.
We were just asked: “I was under the impression that for SEO purposes CSS usage was better than tables. I recently heard that CSS is ignored by the search engines”.
Search engines change their behaviour constantly, and it is always kept secret, so the best answer anyone can give involves a degree of research and guesswork. SEO researchers constantly try different strategies and notice successful patterns in what does or doesn’t work, as do we.
Many years ago Silktide released a free tool called Sitescore, which created free reports on any website. The tool was a huge success: actually, it was too successful.
A week after going live, we had 27,000 links pointing to us (mostly blogs), a year later over 1.8 million. Our site became more popular than the University of Nottingham in under 6 months, and that’s with zero offline marketing and five employees.
Hands up, we admit it.
The criteria for any test – not just ours – are inherently arbitrary. You might be using W3C’s validator, for instance, and assume that because it’s got W3C stamped over it, that it’s the perfect way of testing that your HTML is ‘correct’.
And you would be wrong.
This is a challenge we face every day: what can we actually test with a computer?
This is the first in a series of open strategies Silktide Software will be putting on our blog. We can’t tell you everything we’re planning, but we believe transparency nearly always helps us and our customers.
We love the web. We want to make it a better place. Our challenge is figuring out how to do that best.
We’re truly chuffed to announce the launch today of Nibbler, our free tool for testing websites.
Nibbler is a free, cut-down version of SiteRay, but designed to be useful and fun by itself. It takes a 5 page sample of any website and rates it for a tonne of criteria, covering accessibility, SEO and social networking among others. We even tell you how dated your website looks: fear the words “your website is sooo 1995”.
Who says the web doesn’t deserve a love letter?
We love how you hold the entire knowledge of the world, yet keep on growing.
We love how you accept our every question, and answer them in an instant. How you see every opinion on every topic, yet choose to judge no one.
We love the way that your trillions of parts somehow just work, and keep working, despite a world of attacks and faulty parts. Despite it all, you keep on getting better, faster, ceaselessly, and seemingly without limit.
