Auditing lousalternator.com

For this assignment, I choose to audit my dad's business's website… lousalternator.com. I ran two reports, Lighthouse and WAVE. Before I ran these reports however I asked the owner of the website if they were happy with it. He stated that it was slow, but looked better than most other website options. He made these assumptions with no web development background. Based on these two reports three areas of the website that I believe should be improved are contrast, implementing HTTPS, and adding a description to the metadata.

First relating to accessibility the contrast of the page is not high enough. The website includes only 4 colors: white, black, grey, and blue. The lack of contrast does not allow the significant difference between the background and foreground. Based on the WAVE report the element that creates the errors is light blue text against the white background. I suggest changing the color of the text to a dark blue or dark grey color.

Second, relating to best web practices I suggest protecting this website with HTTPS. Even though you can not purchase anything on the site and cannot input any sensitive information it is still extremely important to protect the owners and users. This issue can be solved by obtaining a single certificate for a single secure origin. The article 'Secure your site with HTTPS' give good information on how to secure your website and issues after obtaining a certificate to avoid like blocking crawling and making sure the webserver supports SNI

Third, relating to SEO, aka optimizing for search rankings, the website is missing an alternative text tag and missing metadata descriptions. These are important so that when the search engine returns a list of websites that lousalternator occurs as high as possible on the list. Both of these errors are very easy to fix just by adding alternative text to the image and inserting a description of the webpage in the metadata description.

Overall the website scored well overall but bad in performance. These changes can easily be made to improve the quality of the website and possibly create more traffic to the site.