By Bill Slawski, on February 4th, 2009I’m in a testing mood tonight, and put together a list of tests that you can run your blog or web site through if you feel up to learning more about your pages…
1. See what grade level your blog is at with a Readability Test. (The original link has been replaced with a more informative one. The older one kept on becoming unavailable, and there were some issues involving possible web spam associated with it.)
2. Find out if the Gender Genie can predict the gender of your blog’s author.
3. Gauge how well the HTML or XHTML of your blog validates with the W3C Markup Validation Service.
4. Discover whether your site is available behind the Great Firewall of China.
5. Check out how accessible your website might be with the Wave Accessibility Tool.
6. Take a peek at how your site might appear on an iphone.
7. Explore your site to see if you have broken links.
8. Let Microsoft Adcenter determine how much commercial intent your site seems to have.
9. Make your site render in grayscale.
10. Get an estimate of how many visitors your site gets a day.
11. See how your site looks in different browsers.
12. Extract the Colors and their names from your site.
13. Catch people who might be plagiarizing your words on the Web.
14. Convert your site to text only to make it easier to read on a phone or other handheld device.
15. Translate your page into another language (I liked how mine looked in Traditional Chinese).
Cool list of tests. My site is accessible behind the great firewall of China! Woot woot!
there goes my evening … lots of checking to do now
(I like the Myanmar Language, no idea what it means, but it’s a nice design)
That’s a cool list. I tried the iPhone one – you’d be amazed at how things either look the same or totally messed up. I’ll have to check out the other things.
[...] Wenn es nach dem Beitrag Test your Blog von Bill Slawski geht, durchaus. Einige der Tests dürften bereits bekannt sein, aber diese Liste von möglichen Tests scheint mir die vollständigste zu sein. [...]
[...] Bill Slawski has posted a nice list of tools for testing a blog – some of them are more of an entertainment value methinks, but then you never know what can be useful to improve your stuff! [...]
That’s a nice list, thanks for sharing it Bill! I did know about a few of these – but many others come as a nice little helper. Did the readability test work for you? – seems to be down for me for some reason.
Thanks, Bill.
Some of these online web site testing tools are fun and others are really useful.
The link checking tool from w3.org is very useful. I used to have a Firefox plugin for link checking, but it doesn’t seem real reliable.
Interesting list indeed. Who would say there are so many tests that you can put on your blog for checks. Thanks for sharing.
Nice list! I ran the Great Wall of China Test, the iPhone Test, and the Link Checker and passed all 3! Niccceee…
Nice list. I was surprise when I saw this post on seobysea.com. No doubt this is a good list for testing your blog (website).
G’day Bill. As usual, great post! Thanks mate. I’ve bookmarked in Delicious so I can come back and play when I have a little more time. Nice to have all these tools referenced in one place. Glenn (@divinewrite.com on Twitter).
whassup bill? thanks for the tips.
Hi Gerald,
I’m not sure I expected too many blogs being blocked in China, but it would have been interesting to see if someone had been.
Hi Michiel,
It was fun finding these. The Arabic and Hebrew translations are worth looking at because they shift the justification of text from left to right, which can mess with designs in some interesting ways.
Hi SEOsean,
Reformatting for small screens can mess up a design pretty well sometimes. It’s worth looking since so many people are starting to look at the web on phones.
Hi Affiliate Money Maker,
You’re welcome. The readability test was working fine for me. I hope you were able to get back to it.
Hi People Finder,
Thanks. I tried to find a mix of fun and useful tools. I think all of them can help to look at sites in slightly different ways.
Hi Web Design Beach,
There were a number more that I didn’t include, but I think these were a good start.
HI Agent SEO,
The link checker is one that I spend a lot of time with. I like using Xenu’s Link Sleuth program to check links as well, but it’s not a bad idea to use more than one tool for something like that.
Hi Imran,
Thank you. No patents or overt SEO in this post.
Hi Glenn,
I hope you have fun with them.
Hi Kimberly,
Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed using some of those tests on your blog.
1. Doesn’t work now. You can check the readibility for a particular text using Google Docs by going Tools-Word Count
2. Lol, tested it on this blog post look what it told me:
Female Score: 628
Male Score: 233
Not accurate enough maybe hm…what about I try it on one of my blog posts:
Female Score: 383
Male Score: 425
Don’t know what it uses…but it is a fun tool lol
3. Yeah it’s great tool.
4. Interesting although no much use to small sites but still good.
5. Seems like good analyzer although I don’t know what would be the use of that.
6. Neat
7. Google Webmaster Tools can check the whole site but for long articles this might come handy.
8. Very inaccurate sometimes. It says that everything that contains “buy” has very high value. I still don’t think there’s a substitute for a first hand experience to see if a particular keyword converts by TESTING IT…not relying on tools.
9. Seems nice.
10. Tested it on my site. Was a bit high but close-to-accurate.
11. Very nice tool one of the better ones.
12. No idea how this would serve lol.
13. Oh copyscape…the best.
14. Nice too
15. Google Translate rulez…like this post
Great list of tests. I did pretty well on most of the tests. The statbrain site is a little off that it predicts my site to get a lot more traffic than it is currently getting. I wish I was getting as much traffic as it predicted
Some nice tools there. The gender one is quite impressive. It got me.
I was also wondering what my site might look on the iPhone.
LOL this seems to be fun, I will test it using my Blog URL and see what coming result will i get afterward
That’s a great list of tests. The iphone test is particularly interesting – I’d never come across that before but as its popularity increases it will become increasingly important to ensure that your site displays properly on iphones and other mobile devices.
Great post. I’ll definately bookmark these links!
One point though – The Blog Readability Test is broken – it was found out as a link building scheme.
Here’s an alternative readability test:
http://www.read-able.com/
It does grade level scores and reading ease – very easy to use and powerful.
Hi Mark,
Interesting scores, and observations on the tests. Thanks for sharing them. I tested this post with the gender genie, and was surprised to see that result as well. As for # 5, I’m a big believer in trying to build as accessible sites as possible.
Hi pays to live green ,
Thanks. The statbrain result gives you something to aim at now, doesn’t it.
Hi David,
Glad that you enjoyed the tests. Interesting seeing how sites look on the iphone. I think more people will be visiting web pages on phones in the future than we may ever imagine…
Hi Ricky C ,
Glad to hear that you had fun with these tests.
Hi cmcridland,
My thoughts exactly on phone usage and the web…
Hi Homer
Appreciate your kind words and the information on the readability test I was showing. I just checked it, and it was down, so I replaced it with one that I’ve been using for a couple of years that provides more information and more detailed scores. I hadn’t heard about the link scheme aspect of that page before, so thanks for letting me know. The link that you provided is pretty good as well.
Have any of you guys tried the new Iphone bar coded app? Take a picture of the code and iphone takes you to a webpage.
Great tools. Thanks for the post.
Another one that is very useful is a website test, which shows the download speed of the website and each web page component. Recently Google announced that if a website is too slow to respond and does not open within certain time frame, they will drop it from the index.
Hi tpletch,
I almost added one barcode application in the list above, but ended up not including it. I do think that barcode applications for mobile phones are very interesting, especially when they are used offline in print publications or on product labels or in other ways, and can provide quick access to online information through a web enabled phone. I hadn’t seen the iPhone bar coded application, but I suspect that we will see bar codes for moble devices more frequently.
Hi George,
You’re welcome. I don’t recall any such statement from Google about dropping pages from its index based upon whether or not it was too slow to respond, and I would be surprised to see that. If you have a link to that announcement, I would appreciate it if you would post it.
I had seen Google mention in that in May of 2008 that the speed of download of a landing page may be considered as part of the quality score that they calculate for paid advertising. See: Landing page load time now available on the Keyword Analysis Page
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the loading time of a page will impact organic search results. It is something to be concerned about, but I’m not sure that we can state with any certainty that a slow loading page will be dropped from Google’s web index.
I’ll have to give this a test on a couple of my sites. I do the majority of your tests but could probably start doing the the grayscale test.
Thats are really great tools for developer. However, some of it is not accurate like traffic estimation tool and browser test tool.
I will say that the estimate of website visitors is spectacularly wrong. Its high by a factor of 50+.
I wish I got that many visitors.
I suspect that the biggest single factor is the alexia traffic rankings, which is not accurate for the lower traffic sites, especially when the most common visitor, me, has the alexia toolbar installed.
very cool list,it is useful for me. and i am from web development shellharbour
Hi Martin,
I like the grayscale test, too. I was thinking of the Gray Box Methodology that Jason Santa Maria describes using in designs when I read it.
Hi Kelvin,
Thanks. The traffic estimation tool might be off a bit, but I thought it was interesting enough to include. There are a number of browser test tools online, though it’s nice to be able to actually look at designs in other browsers rather than just through one of those. I like to try to do that.
Hi Fava,
The Alexa information may be skewing the traffic data more than it should, and I suspect that you’re right that it is off more that it should be. I’d recommend that anyone with a site interested in seeing more accurate information about their traffic should use a web analytics program or log file analysis program to get a better sense of how many visitors are actually coming to their pages.
Hi Peter,
I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed these tools as well.
Great and very useful list. Cheers for sharing it.
I have already book marked this site. Looks like a lot of fun test for your blog. Thanks for the post
Hi peterK,
Glad you enjoyed it. You’re welcome.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for bookmarking my site. Look forward to seeing you here again.
Hi William,
Great Work. I have used a lot of tools. This set give me a different kind of experience in handling a website. The most i like is
http://browsershots.org/
Hi CAP,
Thank you. I put this list together when I couldn’t find one that included a lot of different tools like the ones I listed. I hoped that it would provide people with some tools that they might not have considered using before. It sounds like I succeeded from your response, and the other comments I’ve received.
Thanks for a very useful list of resources. Its tools like this that make things easier. One very useful tool I use is http://www.websitegrader.com/
Thank you again William, this is a great post and i bookmarked it at my work when i am away from and my laptop i can use these tools to evaluate and test any site i want …. thank you alot!
These are some cool tests – I’ll run my blog through them tonight. It took me hours to get my site W3C compliant but it’s worth it for SEO. I would mention though that the http://www.statbrain.com/ one doesn’t seem to work?
Hi Justin,
Thanks. I’ve seen a good number of other online tools as well. The website grader shows some interesting information.
Hi LebSEO Design,
You’re welcome. Hope you enjoy using them.
Hi Adam,
Thank you, too. I like working towards having sites compliant with the W3C standards. Think I need to do some work on this site since my recent updates.
I’ve run statbrain a few times, and it worked for me. I wonder if they were having problems when you visited.
Great list William, I have noted all the points. First I will check the blog on my web site then distribute to friends. Testing the blog on all points seems to be little bit difficult for me and other new bloggers. Is there any easy way to do this?
Hi Agra Indian,
Thanks. I hope that you enjoy running the different tests. The tests are all offered by different providers, and there’s no easier way to run them than to visit all of their pages.
cool check list, thanks
You’re welcome Kaplang
Lots of testing to be done here, but my new blog seems to withstand the testing, thanks for this post.
Hi David,
My inspiration behind this post was to find some fun tests for web sites that might also be informative. I’m happy to hear that you enjoyed the post.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for the list, good to see that you are thinking ahead to the future of mobile blogging. With the advent of the iPhone it wont be long before web/mobile accessibility is any developers number one priority on the checklist.
Nice to see you also included my number 1 pet hate, broken links! there is nothing more annoying than an error page, even if its a custom one!
Thanks again
Mark
Hi Mark,
You’re welcome. I think sites that have been working on preparing their sites for mobile devices are a step ahead of the crowd. It’s a good place to be.
I agree with you on broken links, especially on old blog posts. It’s worth spending the time going back and checking those.
Nice to see you have spent some time documenting this checklist. Not every web design firm or designer takes the time to test thoroughly their work on a constant basis. Like a previous comment testing for broken links is an absolute must
Hi Sydney Website Design,
Thanks. It was fun putting this list together, and some of the tools are more helpful then others – but they can be very useful.