As the demand for website checks grew, I started offering complete usability analysis for websites. I checked things like readability, colour contrasts (accessibility), loading time, word choice and more. The results were presented publicly and discussed in the forum with the other webmasters (that’s how called people who program, run and manage their own websites back then). The usability test was intended to be constructive and more than just a rating, and so there were many suggestions for improvement from other site operators.
The sites that performed best received an award called “Brain of the Internet” in form of a nice image that website owners could put on their websites. This was not meant to be serious, but rather humorous. But the webmasters who had a good usability grade took it seriously and proudly displayed it on their websites 🙂
Under usability-test.net I collected these test results together with other relevant resources on the internet in a DMOZ-like link directory which was a self-hostable open source php script.
Over the next 2.5 years, I tested more than 70 websites until I could no longer keep up with the demand and had to end the project.