Global Links

Quick Links

Websites


HINT: Target specific domains eg. "site:eden.rutgers.edu"

People


EXAMPLES: "John Smith" OR "Smith" OR "Smith, John" OR ",John" OR "Van Horn,"

Buildings


EXAMPLES: "ASB" OR "Core" OR "Hill" OR "Werblin"

Events

University Units


EXAMPLES: "Admissions" OR "Registrar" OR "Computer Science" OR "UHR"

Usability Testing & Web Traffic Analysis

Course Offerings: "Writing and Design for the Web" and Other Courses

If your position at Rutgers includes regular communications projects, you should strongly consider signing up for the university’s Communicator Certificate Program. “Writing and Design for the Web” is a nontechnical course in the program that will help you focus on your website’s purpose and organize information to make your site user-friendly. Additional courses include “Communication Guidelines and Policies,” “Communications Assessment,” and others. Learn more.

Use Surveys and Focus Groups to Assess Your Site

The Rutgers Center for Organizational Development and Leadership can help you assess the effectiveness of your website through surveys, focus groups, and other tools. Learn more.

Put Your Website to the Test

The best way to ensure the accuracy and usability of a website is to submit it to a sequence of tests. We recommend the following.

Proofreading and fact-checking. Have the content proofread for spelling errors and inconsistencies and fact-checked for inaccuracies. Learn more.

Mac or PC? What browser? View each page in Mac and PC platforms with multiple browser types and versions (e.g., Internet Explorer 7.0 and higher, Firefox 3.0 and higher, Safari 3.0 and higher) and at various monitor resolutions.

Accessibility. Test pages with a text-only browser, such as Lynx, and accessibility checkers to make sure persons with disabilities can use them. Learn more.

Redirects. Test old webpages or placeholder URLs that you want to redirect to new/different webpages.

Validate coding/links with W3C open access validators. Just as you can have a spelling error in your text, you can have a syntax or other error in your coding and links that will lead a user to a dead end. Testing with these validators will ensure that proper coding underlies your HTML, XHTML, cascading style sheets, and web links. For these validators to test your site, all pages must have a complete DOCTYPE and must specify correct character encoding. For information on DOCTYPES visit A List Apart. For information on character encoding visit W3C.

  1. HTML Validator checks the markup language (HTML, XHTML) of web documents.
  2. CSS Validator checks cascading style sheets (CSS) and (X)HTML documents with style sheets.
  3. Link Checker checks links and anchor links in webpages or full websites.

Web Traffic Analysis

Once your website is built or updated and is up and running, you will want to analyze its effectiveness. Which pages are getting traffic? Are more hits coming from within Rutgers or outside of Rutgers? How are users interacting with your website? These tools will help you understand your web traffic: