What is your website actually worth ?

If you are curious what your own website is worth you likely have used one of the numerous online tools that calculate it's value. The problem is, these simply can not be accurate, and often give the website owner a false impression their site is worth much more than it actually is, or occasionally much less.

Using one of my own site's I've tested numerous services that calculate a website's value and the numbers have been all over the map, one as low as $67 and one as high as $16,000

The truth is, things, website's included, are worth what someone is willing to pay for them. So how can you get a reasonable idea of what your website is worth? Do the same thing other businesses do. Figure out how much profit the site makes in a year and multiply that number by 3 to 5.

For example, I have a website that earns roughly $1000 a year (not much I know, but it's a start) So if I were to sell it I'd start with an asking price of $5000, but might consider an offer as low as $3000.

This not to say the website worth calculators are meaningless, they can be used as a general gauge to evaluate a site's performance month to month, but for that I prefer a different set of tools...

Website Grader http://websitegrader.com
Offers a free and in depth report of how well the site is doing in terms of on site SEO optimization and off site factors. What I like most about it is the advice is sound when it detects an area of your site that could use improvement and the overall "score" is easy enough for me to remember from month to month.

There are of course gentle nudges to register for their free trial, which I haven't yet, but I suspect that would be time, and potentially money well spent.


Push 2 check http://push2check.com
I recently discovered this handy site and have made it part of my daily ritual, right after my morning coffee and email check. I could probably cut back to weekly checks. Maybe I have a slight case of OCD? Anyways, the cool thing about this site is it keeps track of your previous stats, so you can easily see if your site's overall performance is improving or not over time. It's also a pretty handy way to access other performance indicators like the almighty Google page rank, Alexa score and counts of social bookmarks.

So in the end, like I said, your web site is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, but with the tools above, a bit of hard work and persistence you can increase it's value over time.

The lost art of writing HTML

I remember back in grade school, while I got pretty good grades for spelling and English grammar, I continually got bad marks for penmanship. Yes it's true, my handwriting was terrible. It seemed I was destined to print all my life, or maybe become a doctor, a profession where illegible scribblings is typical.

But eventually, with practice my handwriting improved. Then along came the computer age, and almost everything I've "written" was typed. Now if I actually need to write something, it's nearly as bad as it was back in my grade school days.

This is what I see happening now with HTML. The typical "webmaster" has become so dependent on WYSIWYG HTML editors, that when tasked with actually writing HTML themselves, they fail miserably,, but who cares right? as long as it looks ok, who cares how terrible the underlying code is.

In fact malformed HTML code became the accepted norm. Web browsers developers even started compensating for it. Oh, you forgot to close your paragraph tag before opening another...  no problem, the browser just fixed this for you, and unless you actually scrutinized the source code, you'd never know of the mistake.

Many website owners are just like me when I became dependent on the keyboard, and as a result today the typical website is full of what I call bloat code and HTML errors.. but that's OK, because today's web browser just compensate for it.  I'm not convinced this is actual progress.