Purpose of the website

Dear all,
Looking at the two results for test site #2 it becomes ever more important to include a summary of the purpose of the site. In this case is the site a portal providing links to resources or is it a support site providing the resources? I took it to be the former and I guess that Detlev thought the latter.

I suggest that we should include the purpose either as part of the scope – or better still as the initial step.  Whenever I write reports or test scores I always start the executive summary with a short description of the site’s purpose because it helps everyone keep in focus. 

Knowing the site’s purpose also helps us to establish the importance of individual parts of the site so we can identify and concentrate most effort on things such as the correct “common functionality” (#2b).

I do not think it practical to add an extra step for this as it would require renumbering everything – so I suggest that we add it as a sub-step to step #1 by making it step 1a and then the existing sub-steps can be renumbered 1b – define scope – etc.... The title of step 1 would need to be changed to something like “Describe the purpose of the site and define the scope of the evaluation”.

Regards

Richard Warren
Technical Manager
Website Auditing Limited (Userite)
http://www.website-accessibility.com