St Albans website usability: a twelve-point self-check

Original research framework · St Albans

What this publication does, and does not, claim.

This is a practical, published assessment framework, not a completed survey of St Albans businesses. We have not collected, verified or published scores for a representative sample of 20 local websites. Until that fieldwork is completed, presenting a percentage of websites with poor mobile navigation or broken forms would be misleading.

The framework below makes the research method transparent and immediately useful. Business owners can check their own website using the same twelve criteria. When a sample has been assessed, results can be added with inspection dates, sampled sectors, limitations and enough methodology for a reader to judge them.

Audit methodology

The twelve checks that matter more than a polished homepage.

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Each check should be marked Pass, Needs work or Not applicable. A pass means the issue was tested, not just that the page looked reassuring. The assessment is designed for local service businesses rather than complex applications. It is not an official Google score or a prediction of ranking, lead volume or sales.

For an external study, a criterion that cannot be checked without admin access or making a real contact request must be recorded as Not tested, not silently judged as a pass or failure. Publicly accessible analysis should not submit false bookings or spam businesses.

Interactive self-check

Run the twelve-point check on your own website.

Select what you have verified. The result is a checklist of items to investigate, not a fabricated quality score or a guarantee of better rankings. Your answers stay in this browser session and are not submitted to FifteenFold.

If an item is not applicable to your website, leave it unchecked and make a note. The count is not a percentage of quality because circumstances and importance differ across businesses.

Planned independent research

How a reproducible St Albans business sample should be studied.

To publish actual area-wide findings, we would define the sampling frame and inspection date before collecting results. A sensible first study could examine 20 independently operated St Albans service-business websites across several categories such as trades, wellbeing, retail and professional services. Selection criteria, excluded sites and business categories must be documented rather than picking only the worst examples.

Two researchers should apply the same published scoring rubric, save screenshots and record disagreements. Public checks should remain separate from owner-verified items such as form notification delivery, analytics and admin ownership. The final report should show raw pass/needs-work/not-tested counts for each criterion, an explanation of selection bias and no unsupported conclusion about the whole St Albans economy.

This publication will be updated with the dataset and dated findings only after that work happens. Until then, the responsible result is the usable methodology and checklist above.

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