In a time when more and more people are getting cellular phones, there is an increased need for being able to find the best deals. I have found a website that I feel is good for finding a great deal on a phone (in fact, getting paid to get a phone) but doesn’t necessarily hold up when it comes to an analysis. They have great deals that should not be missed, but they definitely need to improve their website coding standards. Although the website works, and offers good resources, you will see why I feel it needs improvement.
The company, A1Wireless.com offers its visitors a large amount of options. They can take a look a multitude of different phones from various companies, compare rate plans, and… most of all… not only get a free phone with free shipping… but you also get paid up to $125 (the most I’ve seen) just to get one of the phones!
Here’s the grade and the reasons why.
WEBSITE GRADE FOR:
A1Wireless.com
A = USEFUL CONTENT (4cr)
A = APPEALING DESIGN (3cr) (The layout is very clean. Simple.)
A = EASE OF NAVIGATION (3cr) (Very easy to navigate, with the ability to click on various logos to change the phone category you want to see.)
F = VALID CODE SYNTAX (2cr) (Upon running a validation check on the HTML behind this website, View Validator Oh dear. Well, finding 789 errors on a the main page of website is purely unacceptable. A quick check of one of the subpages yielded 1423 errors. And multiple HTML and BODY start and end tags??? After seeing that, I just stopped looking. What does that tell us? Poor coding, pure and simple.)
D = DISABILITY AND BROWSER ACCESS (2cr) (Upon running a validation check on the HTML behind this website, View this Validator, it came up with more problems that should be fixed. There were 88 unset image command tags on the main page, and none had their proper alt text. I would like to see this fixed because I am someone who advocates Disability Access for the Web. Of course, the other bonus is faster loading time with predefined image sizes. This site is obviously designed only for people using Windows and Internet Explorer also, because there are no fonts used that are compatible with Mac OS, and the webpage has multiple errors for Netscape and Opera browsers.)
B = FINDABILITY (3cr) (Pretty decent. But, don’t use line breaks in your keywords! It will make it harder for robots to search and index your pages.)
F = FRUSTRATION LEVEL (3cr) (Ack! There were no broken links but… The, the site would take approximately 48.7 seconds to load over a 28.8 kbps network connection. That is WAY too long. A 14.93 second culprit in that large amount is the huge ‘refer a friend’ image at the bottom that should be compressed. The HTML code alone takes up 51.1k, which could be compressed to 37k (saving 27.6% of the page size and increasing speed. Of course, writing the code properly would save a great deal of space, and setting the image tags also would help.)
Total Possible Credits = 20 Total Possible GPA = 4.0
Total Quality Points Given = 51
Total Website GPA = 2.55 (C+)
~Review conducted by WebsiteStyle.com~
It’s almost 3 years later, but I think we’ve made terrific improvement with the usability of our site. Please feel free to take a look and review it again. Any new suggestions you may have will be carefully analyzed.