Key Points:
You may envision a website that is managed with military precision, but what does your site visitor see? With more and more site visitors entering your site at arbitrary (and perhaps even forgotten) pages, chances are that they are seeing a lot of inconsistency rather than consistency. In this blog post, I'd like to discuss how to talk about how consistent your site is (rather than discussing how to pull off a consistent website).
Let's start with what I feel should be the most basic measure consistency: the percentage of pages that meet a particular standard (or perhaps "all" your standards). Let's take the example of having a standard logo, header, footer, and styling for the left nav across your site. If your site is 10,000 pages and only 1,000 use the standard logo, header, footer, and styling, then you only have 10% consistency on that standard. In other words, you should be evaluating results and not whether you have some standards written out in some crusty standards document somewhere. The point here isn't even that you necessarily are highly accurate in measuring your standardization, but that you are being focused on your actual web pages (since, again, your website visitors may not even go to your primary pages).
When looking at any standard, consider how pervasive that standard is. The following pervasiveness scale can help you figure out where you are on your standards (use the table to evaluate each standard and not your standards en masse):
| Standardization Pervasiveness | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Obscured | There may be some incidental consistency, but this element hasn't been standardized meaningfully. |
| 2 | Suggested | Something that is on the table to be standardized. |
| 3 | Planned | You have plans to standardize this. |
| 4 | Defined | The standard is defined. |
| 5 | Implemented | The standard is implemented in at least one central system rendering the relevant pages. |
| 6 | Consistent | The standard is implemented everywhere. |
Some particular things to watch out for:
- "Build it and they will come" mentality. This happens when perhaps a key central system (maybe even the official one that everyone is supposed to use) may have many standards built into it, but a vast majority of pages are not even rendered by this system. In other words, this is a standard that is stuck at level 5 above.
- "The standard is defined" trap. If you have defined a standard in some static document, then chances are many people don't even know about it. This would be a standard that hasn't gone past level 4.
- Standards that, in an attempt to be broad, actually obscure important standards. For example, if you only have defined standards at a low level (like perhaps what HTML tags are acceptable) then you may be overlooking standards for particular types of content (like not standardizing how events look). This would be a standard at the Obscured level.
