Some websites suck.
With today's post, hopefully I'll be able to tell you a little bit about how you can make yours not suck. A simple audit can give valuable information about your website that can make it function smoothly across multiple platforms. We all know that one website that runs completely fine on our laptop but is a nightmare to operate on your mobile device.
Some auditing tools for websites that are free and easy to use are web.dev and WAVE.
Web.dev is an auditing tool where all you need to do is copy and paste a link into the site and it'll run an audit and generate a lighthouse report for you to see detailed information on performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO flaws on the site. It's great for telling you what's wrong, why it's wrong, and how to fix it.
WAVE is a chrome extension that audits websites in a more visual manner, rather than in the form of a written report like with web.dev.
For this post, I audited the Penn State ResLife homepage with both web.dev and WAVE. Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/N7TEGroI-Vo
In that video, I pointed out some issues that web.dev found on the Penn State ResLife homepage. For the tap target problem, a good way to solve that is to increase the tap targets' size. Tap targets larger than 48 px x 48 px will not fail the audit. You could also increase the padding property or increase spacing between tap targets that are too close together. To make the links in the site crawlable, simply adding the href attribute is the easiest and simplest solution. For best practices in SEO, adding a meta description for the document will ensure that this sire will show up on a search engine using a meta description.
I hope you got something out of this, and here's to making your website not suck!
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