I chose to evaluate vegsource.com, a site devoted to vegetarian and vegan recipes, articles, and health information. I first came across this site while I was working for an assignment for another class. At the time I commented that the site was "a bit busy… [but] full of good information" so I decided that it would be a good choice for a more formal evaluation.
I used a slightly modified version of Kristin Chaffin's website review document (available at
http://ils.unc.edu/chaffin/inls181-f03/details/slides/website_review.doc) as criteria for my review of the vegsource.com
website.
I added the usage of alt text for images and other non-text elements in a page from the W3C's "Checklist of Checkpoints for
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" (available at
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html) to the list of criteria and eliminated the question on
whether the text-only version makes sense without the graphics as there was no text-only version.
My evaluation (Word document) of the website
included the categories of
ranked on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 was the best. There were 46 different criteria with the highest possible score being 230.
An average score would be 138/230.
The vegsource.com website is slightly above average with a score of 139 out of 230. The site had above average
scores in the categories of
There is a large amount of original and relatively reputable content at vegsource.com and at the sites to which there are
links. These are the areas in which the score was most above average. For ease of navigation, the score was only barely above
average as there are some guides to help you find your way through the site. There could be a lot more, and they could
be better organized.
Scores were below average for the categories of
Scores were farthest below average in the category of usability and just below average in the other three categories.
The pages (especially the front one) are far too long and one page with a large number of graphics (which I can't
seem to find again - a sign of the site's poor organization) has no thumbnail images. There are few concessions to
usability with cluttered pages, few alt text descriptions for images, and inconsistently organized and designed
pages. In short, it's a mess.
There is a lot of good information at vegsource.com. However, as I have described further in the section on problems and suggestions for improvement, the site could be significantly improved by an editor's hand as well as clearer organization.
Return to top, INLS 181 page or my INLS 181 portfolio.
E-mail questions to Meghan Lafferty at
melaffer@email.unc.edu
Last updated October 6, 2003.