Our Journey

A conversation with you on what we are upto and how it all began.

Journey

In the not so distant early days this was a private project to help me keep my wits about me.
Having so many web projects it was difficult to keep tabs on everything going on and often lost oversight of the important bits.
So the initial (yet another project) was to do this for me in an unbiased, pragmatic way, so that I could consistently identify the bits and pieces that may have been forgotten or even worse unintentionally removed.
The initial intention was not to cover every aspect of 'What it takes to deliver a Website', but rather a reminder of the 'Essentials' that I really need to have inplace
In hindsight I was quite surprised at how often I would forget stuff or refactor something and accidently undo bits that were previously inplace.

At heart I am a minimalist, prefering functionality over fancy visuals
You can probably still see that in the interface today, pretty simple, not flashy, little distractions.
You won't believe it but the first interface was just a json report that I would have to eyeball.
Being very proud of my first results, I happily showed some buddies, they took one look at the results and I could see them looking for an exit out of the conversation.
That my first cue and honestly I kinda felt the same way, it was hardwork to read and intuitively spot the issues.

It was time to put a simple little frontend together
What a nightmare that was, you see the backend was not setup for anything more than 'Just gimme the results', so in order to do the frontend, I had to redo inpart the backend...aaarg
Anyway to cut a long story short, backend better, frontend betterish, at least now it was easier to understand what where the issues.
Time to invite a buddy over for a beer (and sneek in a review).
Awesome feedback, they stayed a little longer this time on topic !
I noticed that reading all the issues, kinda made it sound like the results of 'Website X' simply said 'What shitty Website' so many issues.
One of the first questions were 'so which of those isses are important ?'
Eeeesh time for some guidance to be included.

First thing was so address wording 'issue' sounds so negetive, perhaps overly harsh and mostly certainly content dependant.
So rebranded to improvement and to help with the context 'a suggested improvement', as for some of my websites they were not relevant.

I noticed that actually some of the 'suggested improvements' were significantly more important than others
Time to provide some guidance to the weighting of the 'improvements'
The birth of the gamification of the 'suggested improvement' was born
Now each 'improvement' had a score and each category had a grade.
Now you could pick your battle and focus on addressing a category by resolving the needed 'improvements' that are applicable to the website being reviewed.

I remembered when my parents got my school report, they were not so happy about the 'F' and were overly happy about the 'A+'
I just assume that most of the readers can relate to those days.
Considering that we all kinda understand how to works, it may be a perfect fit to describe the category Grades
Goodness this frontend stuff takes alot more work than I was planning on doing.
and to top it all this was still just a private project afterall.
I tried to match the grades with the color scheme of the 'energy efficiency', but that looked so aweful when mixed up (and that coming from a non UX person says alot).
Anyway I settled on a color scheme for the grades which was visibly significant and not so nasty when in a mixed up order.

Create an Expert Marketplace so website owners can connect with Experts.
Experts are independant contractors and are not affiliated with Website Review Day.
This way there is no conflict of interest for either party.
Experts can register, set their specialization, contact info, opt in to offer a free consultation.
Experts need to prove their expertise by conducting a Review of their website.
Experts require a Grade of A+ in their specialization to feature on the marketplace.
Website owners will be able to review Experts who achieve a minimium Grade of B+ in their specialization.
Website owners can contact the Experts independantly of Website Review Day.
We wish them all the best in working together.

If you believe in a safer internet and want to support our initiative.
We would like to thankyou for your financial support, by letting our visitors know about you.
We are considering various sponsorship packages to suit your budget.
This option is more suitable for larger organizations who have a service offering outside of our scope but aligned with the overall initiative.

We have been asked quite often now, if we will have a newsletter.
The newsletter should feature:
- Websites who are improving and deserve a little more exposure
- Provide some statistics from all the Reviews.
- Thank our featured sponsors for their ongoing support.
- Fun website leaderboards.
- a flex oppertunity with Expert leaderboards
- Feature Expert Rising stars who are making a difference and would like a litte more exposure.

The reporting of improvements is getting a huge update.
For each improvement, there will be a reference to the webpage/s that there imprivement is refering to.
For each webpage there will be a visual of the element on your website that the suggested improvement is referencing.
There will also be an XPath reference, that the developer can use to locate the specific suggested improvement.
We may include references for elements which are hidden or if feasible snapshot a reveal of the hidden element.