Opquast is a popular online tool for quality assessment of web sites. Until recently it was only available in French, but the team behind it (Temesis, headed by Elie Sloïm) has localized ;-) it in English, including its useful online evaluation tool: My-Opquast which allows you to benchmark a site against 153 best practices that were elaborated with the community (more info over here).
Disclaimer: I know Elie personally and I briefly participated in the community effort during the launch phase. This said, if you're serious about quality testing, you should give Opquast a try, it's free for up to three sites and cheap for the benefits it brings to larger design projects.
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I was quite interested in such a service and signed up. I'm still kicking the tires on it, but it certainly doesn't feel ready for a launch to an English speaking audience.
For that matter, for the types of web apps I've been used to interacting with, it feels very unpolished and very NON best practices.
I *DO* love the list of tests that they have and that they're available under an open license. It's great that they have a free trial that can serve as a basis for testing that you do. I would have loved to have them focus on some of the automated parts.
I'll kick the tires a bit more. Testing seems to be the Achilles heel of web apps these days, so, as I said, even the catalog of tests is a great start.
P.S. Long time reader, first time commenter :P
@Boris: I agree there's room for improvement. I personally don't care too much about the look (otherwise there are tons of sites I'd never use :p), I'm a little bothered about the English translation and copywriting (small discrepancies). But the service proved to be useful and successful in French, I see no reason why it wouldn't fly in English.
I think the automatization, if it's not the #1 request, is very high on users wish-list, and Temesis knows it. But it seems to be difficult to have a push-button tool that would automatically screen any web site against every QA best practice with a reliable result (this "one-size-fits-all" approach would turn me off, for a start). I know they're working on that though, improving My-Opquast with more automatic tests. I'll let Elie answer that.
Hello Boris and François, thanks for this feedback.
The need for automatization is something people frequently ask about. In fact, we have had so many questions about it, that I had to publish this post a few months ago. Here's the link, Boris, sorry not to have it ready in english yet:
http://blog.opquast.com/index.php/2006/04/07/80-outil-manuel-ou-automatique
Anyway, the automatic part will improve quickly. We're thinking seriously about the idea of putting the code under an open source licence and publishing it.
The list of 153 best practices has been written by French speakers. I hope that we will be able to improve the quality of the translation over the next few months. This will depend strongly on the help and comments that English speakers will provide us with.