Has anyone ever hired a company to review their website and critique for usability? I'm looking for a reliable company to use and would welcome any advice.

Interesting... I would like to know this as well...

I have worked on a site, making it DDA compliant after a company hired a firm to review it.

The firm they used was The Shaw Trust. as to their reliability? I don't know, this company spent about £40k making their site DDA after just 1 complaint.

Are you referring to the Discrimination Disability Act? I'm curious if there's been any successful court cases coming from this ACT.

I don't believe there has yet, but I read some where that it is technically illegal in UK if your site restrict access to anyone with a disability.

It scared this company enough, after one complaint that they paid upwards of 40k GBP to make it as complient, I suppose, if found guilty a site could be shut down and if this site is turning over millions then it is not worth the risk.


My thoughts, following the rules, you end up disappearing up your own

There is a lot of grey areas and its a bit of a laugh when the critiques own sites have mistakes.

In the end, making a site xhtml and seo complient, then your about 80% there.

If anyone wants, I can give a post up a link to an internal checklist that I wrote up.

What is your take on this site? I just Waved "Hosting Discussion" and found the results very interesting.

I use the wave firefox plug in for a quick check on a site design, this highlights missing alt tags or forms without labels. Its identical to what that does

The Colour_Contrast_Analyser.exe is very useful and surprising tool

http://www.wat-c.org/tools/CCA/1.1/

a quick checklist here:

checklist

sorry for the watermark, didn't have acrobat pro on my pc, so just used a free download to delete a few pages at the front.

Cheers.

I haven't used any professional firm for analyzing my site's usability but I have found forums to be useful for this kind of thing and not to mention affordable (as in free).

I believe this forum has a section for reviews, you might get some valuable free feedback from there as well as other webmaster sites. However, if you can afford professional critique, then go for it but even then, I still think it would be a good idea to get some free feedback first to get the most obvious issues ironed out or to serve as a way of testing the professional firm's knowledge.

Yes, people do hire people for such work. Most places that do critique provide a full report on what they would change and back it with why they would change it. Find a designer you like (style wise) and contact them directly. Tell them you like them as a designer and was wondering if you would give them some feedback (positive and negative). Most of the designers I know personally would be more then happy to help. Best of luck!

I've used some sites in the past that not only did usability testing but also tracked exactly where the mouse was on the screen, what parts a user actually clicked on, and many other things.

If you want to know a lot about SEO and tools to use to help you manage your site, checkout StomperNet. Their fees are considered expensive by many $800/month, but the information is invaluable and depending on your site and product, you can quickly recover that $800/month expense by following some of their guides.

If you're looking to do TRUE testing, it's not cheap - $25k is about the ball park for starting testing which has 20 people in a controlled environment to test how users react to certain things and where they look for information.

If you're truely interested in spending that kind of money and getting results, send me a PM and I'll get the details for the companies that I've worked with in the past.