Just the word audit can conjure up scary images of long, drawn out painful work. However, audits can be a very useful tool, especially when applied to your website by skilled professionals.

Your website can often be the first point of contact between your company and potential customers. If you sell products or services, or provide web-based services, your customers will regularly use your website to place orders, manage their services and accounts, and contact your staff. If your website is broken, has confusing or inconsistent content, or is difficult to use or manage, it can quickly turn off your regular customers. Those same factors may turn off potential customers to your company and the products and services you are trying to sell.

Powder River Technologies, Inc.(PRT) does website audits for all sized websites, from personal website to large enterprise sites.

A website audit is a quality audit of your website. Part of the audit measures what can be called mechanical failures, such as broken links and failed database access. These items can be readily located and identified. However, part of the audit involves what are called "usability issues." Usability is often an arbitrary measurement of how hard it is to use a website and navigate through it to locate information or products.

That is where experience comes in to play. At Powder River Technologies, Inc., our experienced Web professionals can perform a Website Quality Audit for you. We use a standard grading system that we have developed, based on our experience, that takes into account these factors, and more. When we are done, we will deliver a report that shows you easily the areas of your website that can use improvement.

Websites should be audited during the development cycle, and then again right after they go live. Development environments often do not reflect actual production or live environments, so links and other applications may not work as expected. After a website has been brought online, if you are running any web applications, they should be checked regularly to make sure that those applications are still working as expected.

Websites come and go on the Web, and when they disappear, the links to those sites will no longer work. Your live website should be checked periodically to make sure that links to other sites, or your own website content, are ready and available.

Sometimes people make changes directly to their live websites without checking the entire site, or even the modified pages. A quick visual check of the page can make sure that the page looks right, but that doesn't mean that the page works correctly. So a quality audit is a good idea at that time, as well.

If you haven't done a website audit in some time, then now is always a good time. Regardless of how long it has been, we at Powder River Technologies, Inc. are available to perform the audit, and to help you perform regular audits after that. Contact us today for a quote for your website audit.