Found a cool tool today called Website Grader. Website Grader by HubSpot is an SEO tool that helps you diagnose how well your website doing in terms of SEO, social media, and traffic.

I ran Website Grader for QTT...


Some interesting notes from the analysis report:

• The blog scored low due to a low volume of incoming traffic (links, tweets, etc...).


• The readability level is "Primary / Elementary School". That's exactly where we want it.


• We are missing metadata. (I should probably add that...)


• Interior pages are missing descriptions as well. (Who the heck is the admin for this site? Oh wait....)


• I learned something really interesting about domain expiration. (I had no idea.)

(click for full image)

All said and done, a very helpful little tool. I ended up running a couple other websites I have as well. Needless to say, the feedback was consistent. I make all the same mistakes with each site. Guess I need to renew some domains and update some metadata this weekend.

Today's tip comes via Tim Koopmans. Tim recently posted on landing page load time and how tools like BrowserMob can help. Based on his post, I went over and took a look at BrowserMob and ran a couple of tests on my personal website. There were a couple of interesting things I found in the free tool they provide:

• They provide test results from four locations: Washington DC, Dublin, San Fransisco, and Dallas.


• They provide historical results across test runs:


• They provide a detailed breakdown of load times by object, by download site:

Based on these detailed results, I was even able to find out that I have a couple of 404's showing up in my current WordPress theme. I rather like the simple interface, and I find tools like this can be quite helpful when taking an initial look at a site's load time and where that time is going.

In today's web 2.0 world, interesting behavior happens when windows get small. I often notice odd issues when I have my laptop projecting, and if I'm watching a move and typing in a browser at the same time, forget about it.

Just look at the example of when I was writing this post. I love WordPress. I think it has one of the slickest and most intuitive user interfaces out there, and it doesn't even shrink well. As a general rule, when widgets overlap browsers get confused.

If you're testing a web app, whenever you get a screen of any sort of complexity, shrink it down or make it big and see what happens.

Stoyan Stefanov recently posted a fantastic set of slides on pitching better website performance. The slides look at different websites and how performance affected the core business. It's a cool idea. I think material like this is useful for a variety of reasons, but most of all because it provides insights into how I can better transform my technical work into something that talks about business value. Each slide is a mini case study on looking at a company and translating performance into a business driver important to them. As testers, we need to be good at that. The more exposure we get to materials like this, the easier it becomes to recognize similar opportunities in our own organizations.

UX Booth (and author Matthew Kammerer) posted a fantastic article on user friendly content. In the article he covers a couple of topics that I think work well as test heuristics:

• Avoid using abbreviation


• Make headlines and opening sentences "scanable" by making them your most informative content


• Make paragraphs smaller


• Check the reading level of the content


• Use active voice

In the article he provides some good links to related content.