These applications will help you to make sure your website’s links are all correct, conduct easy online surveys and market your website online with a comprehensive set of SEO, Social Media and Advertising tools.

SEO Software

Raven Internet Marketing Tools

Offering a wide range and comprehensive set of online marketing tools, Raven allows you to analyse data from a variety of sources including SEMRush, SEOmoz and Google Analytics. Raven can manage your entire link building process whilst also monitoring Facebook and Twitter accounts and analysing your Google Adwords campaigns, and more.

You can try Raven free for 30 days and then plans start from $99 per month.

Link Checking Software

Web Link Validator

More than just a link checker, Web Link Validator from REL Software, provides a comprehensive analysis of your website to check all your links, finds errors in html code and can monitor for any changes to web pages. There is also a built-in spell checker for 20 languages and the ability to export reports in a number of formats.

Requirements are a Windows operating system, a trial version is available for 30 days use. Pricing starts from $145 for a basic 3,000 link license.

Online Survey Software

Usermood

Easy to install, Usermood allows you to add a survey to your website to ask users a multiple choice question and track their individual responses. You can control when the survey appears to your users, colours and change the question asked. Usermood is an unobtrusive and straightforward way of gaining important feedback about your website.

Usermood is free for 14 day and then $12 per month for unlimited feedback.

KISSinsights

Another online survey app that is easy to add to your website. KISSinsight means you can survey visitors that are browsing your website, ask them a question and receive targeted, actionable feedback in return. Available in 13 languages, KISSinsights is an easy to use method of gaining valuable user feedback.

KISSinsight offers a free plan that allows unlimited surveys and up to 30 responses or a Premium plan at $29 per month that includes customisable questions and thank you message.

QuestionPro

The list of features for QuestionPro’s online surveys is pretty long but it is still easy to create a survey using a wizard based approach. There are many different question types so if you find Usermood or KISSinsights too simplistic then QuestionPro will enable you to customise your surveys in much more detail. QuestionPro has different options for survey logic, design and formatting plus reporting and so would be more suitable for full surveys rather than quick user feedback.

QuestionPro has a free plan available for 1 survey and 10 questions. Paid plans start at $15 per month.

What do you think of these website testing tools? Let us know in the comments.

Over on WebDepend, we’ve posted an article asking is your website ready for Christmas? Now is the time to review your site in detail and tackle any issues so that you can be confident your users will not hit any problems when trying to make a purchase.

We’re not just talking about site performance issues here although that is part of what a thorough website audit would normally include. Functional problems and browser related bugs can creep into your website left over from updates or other development work carried out on your site. Even SEO work can sometimes cause issues that need to be identified and resolved.

A website audit is essentially a manual undertaking although there are some testing tools that can help and point the way to further investigation required.

Tools For Functional Testing

For an automated scanning tool, I’ve found SortSite to offer good all round results and pick up issues across a range of different tests (or checkpoints as SortSite calls them) including broken links, standards compliance, browser compatibility, accessibility, usability and search engine issues.

SortSite can be a good starting point to get a feel for the overall quality of your website but I would always go through at least the main pages of the website manually to determine what issues were apparent and their relative importance.

SortSite also provide a free online version of their tool that allows you to scan up to 10 pages of your website.

Browser Compatibility Checking

There are a number of browser testing tools that allow you to check your website in a number of different web browsers.

A tool that aims to take a lot of the hassle out of browser testing is Mogotest, which checks that pages are consistent across a range of web browsers. You can also schedule tests to run automatically and get notifications of problems by email. Look out for our review of this tool coming soon.

Site Performance Tools

Heading into the main Christmas selling period you need to ensure that your website is performing well and can cope with the extra traffic.

A free web tool that I’ve found very useful in quickly reviewing the performance of a website or web page is WebPagetest, which checks to see how long each element of the web page takes to download and makes a series of suggestions as to how performance can be improved.

For load testing, to see how much traffic your website can cope with, there are a couple of affordable options including Load Impact, Loadstorm and Browsermob.

Web Standards

To validate your website against a number of accepted web standards, try one of the Validators and Accessibility Testing Tools we have listed in our Testing Tools Directory.

The most popular are W3C’s free HTML/XHTML validation service, their CSS validation service and for accessibility checking I often use Truwex Online.

SEO Tools

There are many SEO tools to audit your website’s SEO friendliness and performance, generally the best web tools are produced by SEOmoz. Simple crawl tests and HTTP tests can highlight problems with search engines indexing your content and confirm whether your HTTP status codes are correct.

Google Webmaster Tools is also a source of good information allowing you to find out how Google sees your site plus what search queries you are being found for and how many people are clicking on your site.

Prioritise Issues Found

When you find an issue or bug that needs to be dealt with make sure you use a bug tracking or issue tracking tool so you can not only keep track of everything you find but also prioritise those issues to be fixed first.

There is only a short amount of time to tackle issues before the peak Christmas sales period and so critical and important items should be resolved as a priority.

One such bug tracking tool I like is PivotalTracker, which is free and I find great for keeping up to date with bugs and issues across a number of projects. It is easy for a team to use and shows a prioritised backlog of issues for developers to work through.

Of course, even once you have used those testing tools you need to ensure you spend time reviewing the website manually and you will be surprised at what you can pick up.

If you would like someone to carry out a website audit on your behalf then look no further than WebDepend.

Is your website ready for Christmas? Let us know what challenges you faced in the comments.

At the moment that testing subject of choice is known as Conversion Rate Testing, or sometimes called CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). This would normally mean that the tests being carried out are Split Tests or Multivariate Tests, using software such as Google Weboptimizer.

Don’t get me wrong, conversion rate testing is really important and can greatly increase the number of conversions on a particular page, which can raise sales, enquiries, profits or whatever aspect of conversion you are trying to improve.

But there are other forms of testing websites, quite a few in fact, and some that are quite basic that get overlooked. I wanted to give a brief description for each type of testing to help you understand all the areas that can (and should) be tested when launching a new website, rolling out a set of updates or at least checking on a regular basis.

Different Forms of Testing

Functional testing

This form of testing aims to ensure that the website works correctly or as it was intended to. You click on a link, does the website display the correct page? You complete a search, does the website return the correct search results? You add a product to the basket, does the website add the correct product to the basket? Functional testing is going through the entire website, including content management system or admin area, to make sure that each function within the website is performing as it should be.

Browser compatibility testing

Different web browsers display web pages differently from each other. This is one of the least helpful aspects of the Internet and browser compatibility testing or browser checking involves testing the website on each of the major browsers (or each browser that you have decided to support), which generally includes IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 3, Chrome, Safari 3 and Safari 4 on both PCs and Macs. You could possibly include Opera 9 and Opera 10 in that list in addition to testing your website on Linux as well as Windows and OSX. You could also check your analytics to see which browsers are most commonly visiting your site. There are several decent browser checking tools listed in our testing tools directory.

Usability testing

Usability testing assumes that your website works correctly and displays in each major browser correctly. However, a website that functions correctly is not necessarily a usable website for your target audience. Usability testing enables you to show your website to a group of users, ask them to perform certain actions and see how they accomplish those tasks. There are many reasonably priced usability testing tools on the market that have made this type of testing much more straightforward, many of which are listed in our testing tools directory. It is possible to gain great insight into how people actually use your website and a lot of the experts agree that you can pick up most usability issues when testing with only 5 users.

Accessibility testing

Accessibility testing is extremely important to make sure that your website complies with best practice and accessibility guidelines plus legislation surrounding accessible websites, which is in force in both the US and UK. In the US there is Section 508, which is part of the Rehabilitation Act and in the UK we have the Disability Discrimination Act or DDA. A fully accessible website not only benefits those users that would otherwise have difficulty using your website but search engines will also be able to navigate and understand your content more easily, thereby helping your search engine rankings. To help you test your website’s accessibility there are some accessibility testing tools available in our directory although manual testing is still recommended.

Performance testing

Performance testing is an area that has always been important but possibly even more so now that Google is starting to incorporate the performance of a website into its ranking algorithms. There used to be an 8 second rule, which believed that a user will wait no longer than 8 seconds for a page to download before they click back and try another website. That rule is a long way out of date, it is now no more than 1 or 2 seconds. Performance testing can show you when your website is slowing down, which pages are taking time to load and what element of the page is causing the problem. Performance testing tools are covered in our testing tools directory.

Stress or load testing

There is a difference between stress and load testing in that stress testing concerns itself with trying to break the system you are testing whilst load testing aims to find out how much volume you can put through the system. Both of these forms of testing are generally for larger websites and web applications. A range of stress and load testing tools can be found in our testing tools directory.

Site monitoring

A really simple test that you can put in place is to automatically monitor your website to check for downtime or outages. Nobody likes a website to be down including users and search engines. Regular downtime will lower confidence in your website and they could be affecting your traffic levels and therefore sales or enquiries without you knowing. A selection of site monitoring tools can be found in our testing tools directory.

Conversion rate testing

The current favourite form of testing, and an important one too. Conversion rate testing or optimisation can greatly improve the amount of visitors your website converts into enquiries and/or sales. If your SEO brings in 100 visitors a day and your site currently converts 5 of those into becoming customers then, with successful conversion rate testing, you could convert more visitors into customers and make more sales. Conversion rate testing normally takes the form of running split or multivariate tests on your website, many of which are listed in our testing tools directory.

Security testing

Websites can have security holes that could be extremely damaging for your business if they were to be found and exploited. Security testing aims to find where those security holes exist so that you can do something about them.

Spelling and Grammar checking

It is always useful to fully read through all text on the website to ensure there are no typos or grammar mistakes. You will also spot how you can improve the readability of text and other areas that perhaps need some attention. Also make sure you read through all messages that appear when signing up for a newsletter, adding products to a basket, or registering including any error messages. Simple changes to the wording of an error message into a nicely worded error message can make a big difference.

So there you have it, website testing can take on many forms and all of them should be completed to a greater or lesser degree. At least by completing each type of testing you can be aware of any issues or areas for improvement so then properly plan out what action you are going to take and when. Good luck with whatever testing you complete.

As many usability experts have been saying for quite a while now, any usability testing is better than no usability testing and the online community has responded by providing us with an excellent choice of potentially enlightening applications for our website or web application.

I have gathered 29 of these usability testing tools together and linked to each within my testing tools directory.

It crossed my mind to provide a bit more of a comparison between some of the usability applications to give you an idea of the features of each, what they provide and how much they cost.

UserTesting.com

Users are recorded completing tasks that you set them

UserTesting.com has a network of users that they pay to carry out tests based in the US, Canada and UK. These users are real people who can complete tasks set to them and think out loud as they browse to tell us what they are doing, what they are noticing and what is confusing them. This is recorded and given to you as a flash video.

How It Works

When you signup for UserTesting.com you specify certain things about your target audience including their demographic profile (including their gender, age, country, household income and web expertise), how many users you want and what tasks you want them to perform. You can specify whether you want to ensure that users completing the test have a particular technology requirement such as having a Facebook account. Users then self select if they match that requirement.

Once you have signed up to the test UserTesting notifies relevant users who respond to the test and start using your website, completing the tasks you have set them and recording their screen and voice whilst they browse.

What You Get

You receive a flash video of what they did, including their keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks and their comments. You also receive a written summary, which includes what they liked, what they didn’t like about your website and what may have caused them to leave your site.

What It Costs

Costs are on a per user testing basis, as follows:

1 user – $39
2 users – $78
3 users – $87 (equates to $29 each)
4 users – $126
5 users – $165
10 users – $360
20 users – $750

So it’s actually $30 cheaper to conduct 2 tests of 5 users than it is to test 1 set of 10 users.

I’ll be conducting a detailed review of UserTesting.com shortly and will post my findings here as soon as I can.

Whatusersdo

Whatusersdo offer 3 types of test - usability, benchmark and SEO research

Whatusersdo focuses on UK users and works to similar principles as UserTesting.com. The testers are very also similar to UserTesting’s in that they have pre-qualified as being able to speak their thoughts aloud whilst they complete a task and have their screens recorded.

How It Works

With Whatusersdo you first of all select from one of three possible tests, either a usability test, a benchmarking test or SEO research.

The usability test is the one that will focus on a particular website, i.e. your website, and so would be comparable to UserTesting.com’s offering.

The benchmarking test means that the user completing the test will complete the same tasks for two different websites. In this way you could compare how your site performs against your competitors.

The SEO research allows you to set a task and then see what the user does and which sites they choose to visit to complete that task.

Once you have chosen your test, you input your instructions, choose the number of testers, their age and gender and submit your payment.

What You Get

The main item that you get is a video showing the user’s screen and mouse clicks with audio of them thinking about the task out loud. You can mark points of interest in the video by using tags plus also share or download the videos. For the usability tests you also get a usability score out of 100, which uses the System Usability Scale (SUS) or Website Usability Scale. For the benchmarking tests the user submits their preferred website.

What It Costs

The usability and SEO research tests cost £25 per user, which is about $40 or €30. There is a slight reduction at 5 users in that they cost £115. The benchmarking test is slightly more at £30 per user or around $49 or €35 although with this test 5 users are offered at no reduction (£150).

OpenHallway

OpenHallway provides the tools, you provide the users

The main difference between OpenHallway and the other 2 usability testing tools above is that OpenHallway does not provide testers, you need to get them together yourself. What OpenHallway does do is to provide the web-based tools for you to create your own test scenarios and then invite users to carry out those tests either remotely or locally, which OpenHallway records.

How It Works

You create the test scenarios with your instructions and then share the recording link with your participants. In this way, you could conduct usability testing with all users in a room or distribute the test for users to complete remotely. The users screen and voice are recorded in much the way way as UserTesting.com and Whatusersdo and you can view the recording in your account.

What You Get

OpenHallway provides you with the tools to create scenarios and record users screens and audio of them completing the tasks. The recordings are then stored in your account for you to watch. What you obviously need to do is find your own users.

What It Costs

OpenHallway provides plans based on an amount of space and so the pricing is a little different to UserTesting.com and Whatusersdo, as you are providing the users yourself.

Plans start at $19 per month and all plans allow you to create an unlimited number of tests within your plans storage limit.

Starter – $19 per month gives you 500Mb storage limit, which is around 90 minutes of video.
Basic – $49 per month gives you 1Gb storage limit, which is around 3 hours of video.
Plus – $99 per month gives you 3Gb storage limit, which is around 10 hours of video. You can also download your test results as MP4 video.
Premium – $199 per month gives you 9Gb storage limit, which is around 30 hours of video. You can also download your test results as MP4 video and gain additional security and API access.

Conclusion

UserTesting.com and Whatusersdo are very similar in price and what they offer with UserTesting having a more US bias whereas Whatusersdo is more UK focused. They both offer a very quick, inexpensive and easy to use service that will get users testing your site within hours from signup. Whatusersdo has a couple of interesting alternatives to the main usability test with the benchmarking and SEO research options.

OpenHallway approaches usability testing only slightly differently and is a good option if you have some users already or know where to get some. If you are conducting usability testing locally and just need inexpensive recording tools then OpenHallway would be the ideal choice. I can see OpenHallway also being the option when you want to test against certain demographics or types of users that are not available with either UserTesting.com or Whatusersdo.

These are just 3 examples of good usability testing tools. I’ll be conducting a review of UserTesting.com shortly and hopefully will also be spending time looking at some of the others in more detail. There are 29 usability testing applications contained in the testing tools directory, ranging from inexpensive web-based applications such as these we’ve looked at today going up to much more expensive usability testing software so please check some of them out.

Whichever you choose, basic and simple usability testing is now certainly a lot more straightforward, cheaper and easier to conduct now than it ever was before. So please consider trying one or more with your next project, or giving them a whirl now on an existing site.

I’ve taken some time to update, reorganise and expand the testing tools page so that it become more of a directory rather than just a long list. This makes it easier for me to maintain and add to plus easier (hopefully) for you to find the testing tools that you are looking for.

The Testing Tools page now serves as the main entrance into the directory with each category having its own page. Each category will continue to have more software and tools added over time plus there will be additional category or two coming along shortly.

Because I’ve been doing a bit of research into Usability Tools, this category is the main beneficiary of the reorganisation and now contains 29 usability testing applications. This is mostly due to the great blog post at Useful Usability, which also gives you pros, cons and pricing information for the 24 usability tools they feature.

Another category that has grown significantly is Split Or Multivariate Testing Tools, which now shows 16 applications. Some of this increase is down to a great comparison resource over at Which Multivariate? This newly released site has reviews and comparison charts of all the major split and multivariate testing software tools out there.

The full list of categories contained in the updated testing tools directory are:

1. Validation and Accessibility Testing Tools
2. Browser Checking Tools
3. Screen Resolutions Tools
4. Link Checking Tools
5. Site Performance Testing Tools
6. Stress or Load Testing Tools
7. Usability Testing Tools
8. Split or Multivariate Testing Tools
9. SEO Tools
10. Web Analytics
11. Online Surveys
12. Site Monitoring Tools
13. Software Testing Tools
14. Web Development Tools

I will continue to pick up on the huge number of testing tools being released and add to each category as time allows. If you spot a testing tool, which you feel is worth me adding to the directory, then please do contact me. At some point I will get around to adding a dedicated submission form if there are enough people willing to add testing applications.

Feel free to retweet, digg or add to delicious as you like or let me know any feedback (good or bad) in the comments.

Loop11 - User Experience Tool

I am carrying out a review of Loop11, a new web-based user experience testing tool and would be very grateful for your input.

Loop 11 allows you to conduct online, unmoderated user testing on your web site. It is not a survey or web analytics tool, but a user experience tool and is aimed at helping you to understand user behaviour.

There are several of these types of tools being released and Loop11 is currently in private beta although is due to be released to the general public soon.

I would be extremely grateful if you could complete a short, 3 step test for me so that I can collect some results and finish my review of the Loop11 user experience tool.

In order to carry out this short test, please click on the link below:

http://www.loop11.com/usability-test/1330/introduction/

Thank you for taking part and please look out for our full review of this usability (or user experience) testing software coming soon by signing up to our RSS feed or following us on Twitter.