Silktide.Com - Reliable Results?

[Auriga]

Having found a site called www.silktide.com i decided to let them assess my website.

I was wandering if anyone else has used this and just how reliable it is?

And yes i got a crappy score :)

[trancedm]

dunno if it's reliable or not but i think i got a pretty good result

http://www.silktide.com/index.php?node=18444&form_refresh=0&form2=1&f2_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.r2xdesign.net%2Findex.php&f2_ok=Test&pagetree=&editSessionid=&objectid=

[manoffire]

I dunno if it is reliable but i seem to be excellent at design, accessibility, etc but not so good with people linking to my site and its not especially popular i got a 6.5 overall. 4.7 for marketing, 8.0 for design, 10.0 for accessibility and 6.6 for experience. :rolleyes:

It seems ok to me and looks like it provides some useful info. Test a load of websites that you already know what they should be then if the results correspond to what you knew then it will most likely be reasonably accurate.

[Auriga]

It's just that i've been using that for a few weeks and i sometimes get different results (only slightly mind) even when i've changed nothing.

It does give useful advice though.

[manoffire]

One thing that didn't seem to be right with the test on my site was it said that knowone linked to it and a search for its name on google returned 0 results. When in reality if i search i get quite a few links back to my site. Could just be the way it handles my site though.

[Auriga]

The links bit definately seems to go up and down.

One day i had 42, the next it was at 18! :confused:

[Scootertaj]

Well I got a 6.5 overall with a site that I just started and has nothing on it :thumbsup:

[mindlessLemming]

Hehe..

Your website is ranked #41 out of 27,768 SiteScores!

My blog got a 9.3 :cool:

...I wouldn't put too much faith in it though.
LMAO -- silktide.com only gets a 9.3!

[Auriga]

Blimey! - Those are some cracking results for your blog!

*applause* :thumbsup:

Microsoft got 8.2! - You beat that! :)

EDIT:

I put in Worlds Worst Website into Google, hit the first listing and got this...

Silktide rating for Worlds Worst Website! (http://www.silktide.com/index.php?node=18444&form_refresh=0&form2=1&f2_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.angelfire.com%2Fsuper%2Fbadwebs%2F&f2_ok=Test&pagetree=&editSessionid=&objectid=) :eek:

[JamieR]

The design of mine got 9.8 :D

Ah..now they are going on about how 'my website is in voilation of British Disability Discrimination Act' :eek:

[Jalenack]

There are things I find that are utter BS...

It gives you an "excellent" ranking to The World's Worst Website

We found an average of 23.2 images per page.

There appears to be good variety in the images within this website (22.0 unique images per page).

Ya...whatever. And then when I ran it through my blog, with a healthy supply of images...it think I have 1.2 images per page...It doesn't realize that most of my images are backgrounds, and should be backgrounds as well.

It also told me my page has no content. Pphh, even though it turned up plenty of TextView text. It also found only 2 people linking to my site, while I know there are many times that.

So it's good in theory, but it's 'brain' is really really dumb.

[chilipie]

One thing I don't get is how a robot can rate your design :confused: .

[JamieR]

I don't trust it...but it's fun :p

[Graft-Creative]

Ah..now they are going on about how 'my website is in voilation of British Disability Discrimination Act' :eek:

I wouldn't worry about that mate - that seems to be a default answer. Don't forget - these guys are after your cash ;)

Gary

[JamieR]

I wouldn't worry about that mate - that seems to be a default answer. Don't forget - these guys are after your cash ;)

Gary

yay :p

[_Aerospace_Eng_]

Blah, it seems once it rates your page, it caches it and goes off that, no matter how much you change it, it said, I didn't comply with the british standards, I was missing a <tr> tag, and fixed it and it still says it was missing. Stupid robot.

[JamieR]

I don't trust it full stop :p

[JohnD]

Silktide is a stupid test. I've tested it with several sites before I even rad this thread and sometimes the results are laughable. Some people give it too much value and proud as they are they place their silktide button with score 8.1 on their site as if that makes the site great, yet they only have 100 visitors a day and a link popularity that doesn't go beyond 100 on several search engines.

Use Silktide to test several sites with Google Page Rank 9 and 10 (there are only about 20 with PR10!) and don't be surprised if you see most sites with a score below 7.8, some even with 6.5. I tested it with a few Photoshop sites (lots of Photoshop related pages and sites on the internet!) and typed 'Photoshop' in Google and one site was #2, the other #3 (adobe #1 of course) out of 22 million results! These sites have 6.9 and 6.7 as Silktide score. Go figure... as if that score makes such a difference. What a bull.
It also sucks at relative links (lots of Dreamweaver users use these). Sometimes it can't find pages because of this bug. A friend of mine has a site rated 6.5, because the dumb test can't find 4 pages, of which one is the stylesheet. Because of that the test whines about broken links. disabillities design shortcomings, no form (that was on these pages), amount of text, etc, all because of that one bug (that was confirmed by others). For some reason it works with some relative links but not with some others, even when you can't see any difference.


Blah, it seems once it rates your page, it caches it and goes off that, no matter how much you change it
That's because you're only allowed to have one test for one url per week ;)

[ReadMe.txt]

i'm not surprised they only allow one per week, the index the whole thing.

I managed a 9.2 overall, i failed the legal thingy cos i used an iframe on one page so that one doesnt validate - wihch is fair enough.

I wouldnt trust them to make my sites "accessible" for 3 reasons.

1) I already do this myself
2) They have a javascript: link on their homepage - how accessible.
3) Their portfolio screenshots use IE (this is bad because it indicates they code /for/ IE, intead of just accounting for it)

On the plus side their portfolio contains valid, non-table designs.