Essay On Features, Functionality, And Recommendations For Media.Telstra.com.au/home.html.

Features of Media.Telstra.com.au/home.html

Question:

Identify the Positive and Negative Aspects of the Website.

As the technology is evolving day by day, thus only having a website does not make it creative or innovative.  The visitors of the websites expects more from the websites they land on. The users are no longer impressed by interesting icons and animated .gifs to develop the website (Earp, Dagnino and Ott 2014). There are certain features that needs to be incorporated to make it more users friendly so that they can find the information they require without spending lots of time to search over the different pages of the website.

 The following report consists of discussion about the features of the website “media.telstra.com.au/home.html”, critical review of the functionalities of the webpages in the site. Along with this, some recommendations are also provided in this report so that the site can be made more user friendly and perform better.

 The Telstra is one of the largest internet service provider in Australia. The given web site “media.telstra.com.au/home.html” is the media and entertainment related site of Telstra. The page helps the users to enjoy rich media content and access to different kind of videos from SportsFan, Sky News, NRL, AFL, Foxtel LifeStyle, Racing Network etc (Media.telstra.com.au 2017). This page is the transformed version of   the “BigPond” home page and is unmetered from the usage of the clients.

 Each and every page of the given website incorporate a Meta description about the content of the page that helps different search engines to find out these pages whenever the search strings of any end users matches with this meta tags present in these pages. In addition to this the pages of this website are frequently updated. As per our review the web site is   last updated on 25th of January of this year.  The frequent up gradation of the website makes it a credible website to its visitors (Earp, Dagnino and Ott 2014).  In addition to that, this also helps the search engines like google to list this kind of results on the top of the search results.  In addition to that the pages of this website are designed in a responsive way that helps the users or the clients of the company to have a better view of the website on the different devices like the smartphones, desktops, and tablets. For this the pages were designed with media specific CSS designs.  More over all the pages of this website have a clearly defined heading in its HTML structures that is helpful in improving the usability of the site. The reason behind this can be stated as, visitors does not go through all the contents of the page, and rather they try to find out the key words related to their queries and ma help in resolving their issues.

This page also uses GZIP encoding for the contents because it reduces the loading time of a web page.  Additionally this website uses the best practice of using a HTTP 301 HTTP code to redirect URLs such as from https://www.media.telstra.com.au to https://media.telstra.com.au.  Which helps the visitors to reach the page easily (nibbler.silktide.com 2017). Most of the pages of this site are optimized for printing that also improves the usability of the site and its different pages.

Recommendations to Improve User-Friendliness and Performance

In addition to all this there are huge number of incoming links are related to this website (5,930,657 pages on 2,112 domains redirect to the homepage of this site). The number and quality   of the incoming links effectively influences the different search engine results on the internet.

According to the “8 golden rules of HCI” the first rule is, consistency. As the pages lacks of the height and width element for the image tag thus makes it inconsistent appurtenance in the different devices with different screen size.

Next as all the pages uses clear navigation and headings thus the page caters to the wide range and type of users (from novice to the expert level users).

The web pages of the site does not provided any kind of informative feedback to the users in the usual interactions, but in case of the any lost page the website provides a standard 404 error page.    

Next, the registration page of the site to open a new Telstra account generates dialogues   to complete the registration process and login to the newly created account.

In order to prevent the errors in the use of the website the website uses the standard HTTP 301 standard code to redirect the users to the home of the site (Earp, Dagnino and Ott 2014).

The pages also provides easy navigation to the other pages meeting the easy reversal actions at any step while surfing the website.

In most of the pages of this site the used images does not have any defined size (height and width). Even though this attributes for the image in a web page are considered as optional, but it helps the web browsers to load and manage the webpages of this website. In some circumstances it is seen that, some of the images on the webpages are stretched by the web browsers.   

Empty internal links:  While inspecting the website we observed that there are several internal links that does not have any specified destination. Which makes the website inconsistent from the end users/visitor perspective.

Noncompliance with the W3C standards:  None of the webpages of the chosen site are W3C compliant.  Example of such error is, a meta element with the http-equiv attribute has the value X-UA-Compatible but does not have a content attribute with the value IE=edge (Earp, Dagnino and Ott 2014). This makes the web pages of this site non compatible with the internet explorer. Therefore

Reviewer 1

Age: 25

Gender: Male

Profession: Student

The website very effectively handles the missing or the broken pages accurately by sending a 404 HTTP error code and sends helps the users to get back to the home page. This media and the content of the different pages of the website is served with GZIP encoding technique that is helpful in faster transfer of the data from the server to the requesting client.   It helps in the faster loading of the devices on the web browsers.

Reviewer 2

Age: 27

Gender: Male

Profession: Student

While inspecting the usability of the given site it is found that the pages of the website consist of huge number of incoming links (5,930,657 pages on 2,112 domains redirect to the homepage of this site). The number and quality   of the incoming links effectively influences the different search engine results on the internet.

Updates, Responsiveness, and Meta Descriptions

In order to improve the usability of the website and the human computer interaction level the following recommendations can be used an implemented whenever the website is upgraded.

Use of height and width attributes for the images: Adding height and width attributes to all image tags will help the pages to load faster on the different devices. The width and height specified in the page should be the same as the source image to provide better user experience.  In order to provide the resizing capability for the images in the pages it can be done using the CSS codes. This will in turn improves the consistency of the page for the visitors. 

Avoiding the file extensions at the end of the URL: It is advisable to avoid the use of file extensions wherever possible for the webpages of the site.  Theses file extensions appearing at the end of (web addresses), can have negative effects on the usability of the website.  The reason behind this is, it makes the address harder to remember for the visitors (mainly for the non-technical users) in addition to that it can expose the underlying technology used for the development of the website, making it vulnerable to hackers. They also tie the implementation of the website to a specific technology, which can make subsequent migration of URLs difficult.

Conclusion

In the different sections of this report we have discussed different positive and negative aspects of the media.telstra.com.au/home.html.  As there are several issues were identified in the review of the site media.telstra.com.au, therefore in order to improve the performance and usability of the site to the existing and potential visitors it is important to incorporate some new technologies and protocols.  In order to improve the web presence of the organization and increase the conversion rate of the mere visitors to the potential customers of the organization it is important to have interactive website.

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