What is a website teardown?

A common practice in which someone evaluates a website “line-by-line” and provides feedback to the website owner within a given context. For instance, in today’s episode, Devin and I teardown four unique commercial WordPress plugin websites submitted by listeners. We’re looking through the lens as if we were landing on their respective sites for the very first time, as an interested customer. The feedback we provide should be used as a guide to help the owners improve messaging, design, and overall usability of the website. At the end of the day, hopefully, this advice proves valuable and increases sales for their business.

Critical website feedback through teardowns

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The process of a teardown is to get feedback that you, the website owner, may not have been able to see with your "business blinders" on. Some of it hurts and some of it makes sense, just know that getting an outsider to look over their interpretation of your design, layout, or messaging is a valuable investment.

A few notes about this episode:

• We had no prior knowledge or relationship with the products or websites evaluated. I knew of one, but had never purchased or used their products before.
• We don’t expect our word to be taken as gospel. As to say, who the heck are we to give advice?! Devin and I are plugin creators and struggle with the same issues we’ve outlined in today’s show. It was an exercise/experience for all of us.
• Life. We realize that some of the KPI’s (key performance indicators) we point out are a result of everything else that’s going on. Folks are building products, supporting products, possibly working day jobs — so we can’t expect every T to be crossed and every I to be dotted.

Interested in having us look at your site for a future episode? Contact me.

Websites we evaluated in this episode:

• http://jem-products.com/
• https://www.rsvpproplugin.com/
• https://sproutapps.co/
• http://quizandsurveymaster.com/

Bonus podcast:

We had some audio issues earlier in the episode, so I decided to keep that out along with the time consideration. In this bonus episode, Devin and I recap our 2015 and plans for 2016 ahead.

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Using our free Baton theme to redesign Quiz and Survey Master

Here’s a bonus video tutorial of how I use our latest free WordPress theme, Baton, to re-design Quiz and Survey Master website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWFHSSeueuw&feature=youtu.be