Would you buy a used website from this company?

Misaligned form button overlaying input

I’m a sucker for mechanical validation (in both senses), so when Gadgetopia linked to Silktide’s Sitescore website testing application, I hied myself hence.

Um. The very first thing I see, since I’m looking for it, is a grossly oversized input for your website URL, with, in Firefox 1.0.x, 1.5rc3 and current trunk, the submit button displayed too low and too far left, overlapping the end of the input. I don’t know or care (yet) whether that’s a Firefox bug or not: if you are selling website development, you should not look obviously broken in Firefox, not in the tail end of 2005.

Then, the very first item in the Detailed Breakdown, where I get dinged as “Very Poor,” is

None of the tested webpages made use of meta tags. This website is likely to be either very old or not well designed. Meta tags help promote your web pages to search engines.

In what century? Is this actually a ghost page, left over from the mid-nineties? You praise me for my “Popularity Rating” and “Popularity on Google” despite the fact that I’m currently in the sandbox, and you think you can teach me something about using meta tags?

I could push my score above the current 8.0 by testing while my first post is something right up my alley (they search for what they guess to be important keywords, and having identified “xml spec” and “xml parser” they didn’t find me, though amazingly enough I’m number 45 for “conforming xml”) and using some pretty pictures to make them happy, but there’s no point: I’m not going to do keyword-stuffed meta “tags” and they aren’t going to love me.

15 Comments

Comment by Breyten #
2005-11-21 01:42:58

I’m not sure what steroids they’re on, but apparently my site uses no tables for layout ;-) Makes you wonder what that table tag does then…

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2005-11-21 02:52:56