Nov 12, 2009
Changes aplenty to Nibbler
We’ve just made a number of key changes to Nibbler.
- Reports now have Summary scores, covering Accessibility, Marketing, Experience and Technology.
- We’ve simplified how reports are displayed, hiding most of the fiddly detail unless you request it.
- Scoring for all tests is now simpler and more consistent.
You can now see, for instance, that some sites are built really well but not as effectively marketed. Or vice versa.
We still have a long way to go of course. The scoring is very rough at the moment and there are lot of holes – things we don’t test for that will make the results far more representative overall (for example: Facebook – the 2nd most popular website in the world – currently gets a 7.5 for marketing).
Future updates will bring more tests, and a lot of refinement to what we already have. Once the scores are reliable enough, we’ll be displaying a league table of the best sites.
You definitely cover a lot of variables here, but I have noticed a couple inaccuracies, at least with our website. Hopefully this will help you refine your tests a bit.
http://nibbler.silktide.com/reports/www.caribbeanchoice.com
1. Website age is pretty close. You probably could refine your results by looking at when the domain was registered, Alexa and The Wayback Machine. You estimate 1997, and the domain was registered September 1998, Alexa found us on September 1998 and the Wayback Machine found us in October 1999. Curious how you came up with 1997.
2. You say our site has no headings. Are you referring to the title tags in the head section of html, or H1 statements? I am guessing you mean H1 tags, since we have titles. At first I was unclear what you meant, until I looked at the HTML of the 5 pages you tested. I should have known what you meant, but my mind went blank. Maybe you should put headings and titles next to each other so it would job our memories a bit what you mean.
3. You said our website has no feeds, but one of the pages you tested (our homepage) has five (5) feeds that Firefox detects. Not sure why your test does not.
4. Delicious bookmarks are off. I get 176 bookmarks mentioning CaribbeanChoice, most of which link to CaribbeanChoice.com. You are currently reporting we have 2. Not sure why it is off that much.
http://delicious.com/search?p=caribbeanchoice&chk=&fr=del_icio_us&lc=1&atags=&rtags=&context=all||
5. I noticed you used Alexa for your rankings (although it does not say that anywhere). You may also want to look at Compete.com and Quantcast as well. None of them is perfect for estimating traffic, but together it can give you an idea. Quantcast is most accurate for sites that use their tracking code. Compete seems to be the least accurate, at least for our website. Might be more accurate for other websites.
6. You seem to have conflicting statements here: First you say: “# 33.3% of Tweets about this website were positive and 0.0% were negative. The remainder were neutral.”
Then you say: “# Compared to most websites, this has a large proportion of negatively worded tweets.”
Those are the things that obviously need a bit of improvement. Looks great for an alpha version. Keep up the good work. I look forward to the beta and the final versions.
Scott – thanks for the feedback. Most of our developers are currently on holiday but I’m forwarding your comments to them now.
I’ll try to answer a few of these myself:
1. Good suggestions here – we’re actually in the middle of rewriting this test almost completely to be much more accurate (and a little more entertaining).
2. Headings means H1, H2, H3 (etc) tags, yes. We need to clear that up by adding proper docs.
3. Nibbler is only detecting RSS feeds which are specified in the <head> of your pages, i.e. using an appropriate meta tag. Most modern browsers will show a feed icon in their toolbar when they detect one of these. The RSS feeds in the page themselves are not currently detected by Nibbler (SiteRay does find them however).
4. I’m not sure of the algorithm used here.
5. Alex is used yes, we don’t currently use Compete / Quantcast but they’re definitely being considered.
6. That sounds like a bug to me!
We’re hoping to have a Beta ready early in 2010 – thanks for the feedback.
Thanks for your response.
3. Actually, the RSS Feeds are in the HEAD as META Tags. They appear to be correct syntax, unless I am overlooking something. Browsers seem to detect the META tags okay.
What accessibility tools are you using for the nibbler? I think ATRC web accessibility checker is more up-to-date than WAI by hisoftware.
Is there a notification by mail for this blog comment?
Nibbler X/HTML validator seems incorrectly detect my doctype. Compared with W3C and Validome X/HTML validators.