This weekend saw the launch of "Free Assessment" services from Gloscon and brought culmination of a very rigorous exercise that spanned more than 2 weeks. The team involved Roshan, Dheeraj, Vaibhav and me, discussing every detail, looking at the "Assessment Questionnaire" from every view point, 

Frankly speaking, I had very little experience of what a "Free Assessment" could be all about. So when i was first asked to prepare an "Assessment Questionnaire" i was bamboozled. Coming from a non-technical background, and also not knowing anything about Drupal or Ruby on Rails, i was literally blank about it. I tried to find out from different website what an "Assessment of a website" would entail.

The first draft was a disaster, although i had a good chunk of questions, most of them were actually directed towards a person who must know how a  drupal site would work. Administering this questionnaire would automatically limit our reach to a wider audience since the only person that could have really answered the questions would have been a Drupal Developer. 

So i had to revisit the drawing room, design questions based on the target audience, verify that those were indeed relevant for our Assessment Exercise and then finally arrange questions into groups so as to give the questionnaire a proper order. Some critical details that we looked into were: types  of questions (relevancy), no. of questions (time), organization of the questionnaire (structure). 

Hence, on Friday, when all the details were sorted out and all changes incorporated, we got the green signal to publish the assessment quesitonnaire. Click here to take the "Assessment Exercise" - NOW!!!

But the big question is: what difference does it makes to our customers or potential customers? I say - a lot!!! Firstly, there is a dearth of properly structured assessment exercises for websites. Secondly, lack of assessment initiatives that deals with high end websites based on Content Management Systems (CMS). Also, as new and new features are being incorporated, websites are faced with new challenges such as spams, performance issues, SEO, Compliances, Standards etc. Clients might not be well conversant with all this and hence an "Assessment Questionnaire" would go a long way in quelling this need.

We all are very anxious here at Gloscon to know, how the market has reacted to our initiative

Cheers!!!

Rajat