Rating the Site

Must Visit!

The best in design, content, and navigation. These are extremely rare and should be comprehensive, offer large amounts of information, and be easy to use.  They often offer multimedia, Flash, downloads, ecommerce, or other extras.  These extras should add to the quality of the site, not just be there for show (all glitter and no substance.)

Rate the site, not the business or topic.  A prominent company may still have a poorly designed site.

Worth the Trip

Quality site, rich in content, easy access to information, professional in design and organization.

Good

Pertinent to topic, original content, functional, informative, up-to-date if applicable, current links, links to other acceptable sites (no porn, etc.), clearly stated purpose that matches content.

If the sites doesn't fit any of the above categories, don't list it.  Our goal is not to list every site but to list quality sites.

Things to consider:

Content (how current is it, how unique, how much information does it offer?) 

A site about New York City during the 1800s could still be interesting and usable even if it hasn't been updated since 1999.  A site about the latest advancements in the treatment of cancer would be missing large amounts of information if it hadn't been updated for that amount of time.  Sites that are frequently updated should usually get a higher rating than ones that appear to have been abandoned.  

Usability (browser friendly, navigation, are the graphics/Flash/whatever worth it or do they just slow down load time?)

Users with broadband access are still in the minority.  Take into consideration the time it takes a site to load when you are deciding on a rating.  If the site has a lot of graphics, is there a text only option?  Are the links to the subpages easy to find or do you have to mouse over images the index page to search them out?  Don't rate the sites based on what fancy new tricks the Web designer knows, rate it based on how easy it would be for someone to use.

Do you spend the first few minutes at the site closing pop-up windows?  If there are more than a couple of pop-ups, don't give the site a "must visit" rating.  Better yet, unless the information is unique and can't be found anywhere else, don't even list the site.  

Appearance (does it look good or like it was designed by a monkey on crack? Use of colors, layout, "under construction")

Sites that have a common theme from page to page (in the layout, use of background, text font) look well put together and should be rated higher than ones that look as though each page was designed by a different person.

If several of the links go to pages that are "under construction", wait to add the site when it is finished.

Things that will lower a rating include: blink tags, text in multiple colors, text that is hard to read because of the size or color, unintentional overlapping of text and/or graphics, or anything that makes you just want to click on something to get you away from the page as quickly as possible.  If it uses more than one of these, don't bother listing the site.