Opquast is an on-line quality assessment tool for Internet and Web sites. Opquast is currently extremely popular within the French webmastering community and has decided to provide its services to an international market. The launch of the international version of the site corresponds to a whole new range of features which make Opquast both more effective and easier to use.

Lire la suite

The internationalization (i18n) of a project like Opquast is a very complicated matter. To begin with the project was entirely in French, done by French speakers, for French speakers. We worked for almost one year with a large francophone community to draft and select the 153 best practices of the first version (which was published on September, the 27th 2004).

Following this we launched the My-Opquast tool which currently has approximately 7000 users who are mainly French speakers. During 2005, the need for internationalization, especially in English, became more and more obvious. We decided to recruit Ian Smallwood who is fluent in both French and English to lead this project.

The Internationalization and localization into English of the project was carried out at the same time as the implementation of new features and structural changes. We're publishing this new version today after a huge amount of work has been accomplished.

Till now, unfortunately, it has been impossible to ensure that the English translation is adequate for different profiles of English speakers. The Temesis team is far too small to easily manage the plethora or cultural particularities that exist.

So, if you feel that some words or sentences are a bit strange, we apologize, please consider this version of Opquast as a first step. Our main priority is to make interaction possible. We wanted you to be able to work with the My-Opquast tool, and to make use of the content.

From today till the end of the projet, English speakers are welcome, and will be associated with the future of the Opquast project. So welcome aboard.

Elie Sloïm (project leader) and Ian Smallwood (i18n manager)

After seven months of long hard work, we can at last announce the launch of the new version of Opquast.com. With the feeling of satisfaction of having accomplished something good we're now on tenterhooks waiting for your feedback.

Very quickly, let me go over the new features of the tool now, and I'll go over them in more detail at a later date:

• English language as well as a French language versions of the site
• Create and edit your own lists of criteria
• Task management.
• Team management has been made easier.
• Improved User interface.

Apart from these visible changes, a lot of improvements have been made to the software and structure of the site. We'll be giving you more details about this soon.

We won't go into all of this with any detail right now because we would like you to judge for yourselves on the quality of this version. There will no doubt be a few bugs. The translations in the English part will probably need improvement as they are the work of one English speaker surrounded by French speakers. Your feedback on this will be very useful also. We'll be tackling all these over the next few days.

There are so many people that we would like to thank for their help and advice over the last few months that I'll write a post about it soon.

We hope that you will enjoy working with My-Opquast.

Let's be honest, Google PageRank, doesn't mean much to most people, but it does give a lot of self congratulatory satisfaction to the teams that work on websites. (sad isn't it?)

Opquast being one of those projects that a lot of people have contributed to, and PageRank being based on the links that you make to the site URL, let yourselves go and give yourselves a pat on the back:
Unless we are mistaken the current PageRank for Opquast is 8.

We don't quite know how long we'll be 8 for so we're indulging while we can. We would like to thank François Palaci who laid the foundations for this result.

With regards to the new version it'll be ready soon. But it's like baking a cake, we don't want to turn it out while it's still too hot.

We recently announced that the new Opquast/My-Opquast version would be launched this week. We have decided to put it off for a couple of weeks for the following reasons:

The new version has brought a number of fundamental changes in the site architecture.
New features will be appearing in your interface and we want to make them as easy and seamless to use as possible. The site contains a large quantity of content that we have entirely translated into, what we hope, is good, clear English. This week we have taken some time to put together a real translation management system. It makes it easy to manage all the language versions of the live content on the site. We'll tell more about this soon, because we really enjoy working with it. The recent ParisWeb 2006 conference gave us a preview of the extent of expectations that some users have for the English language version.

We believe that Opquast is groundbreaking in being the first on-line services best practices list, the first implementation, with over 6000 users, of the EARL standard and the first on-line website quality self assessment tool. And this new version of will be bringing in a whole new set of concepts. So we wouldn't want to mar it all by being to hasty in going on-line.
So we're going to take our time to make sure that everything runs smoothly, and, although we know that a few minor bugs, typos and French language constructs will slip through our net, we want to provide the best possible tool for you to work with.

We'll keep you posted on how things are going.

I don't know how your summer was, but the Opquast team has been hard at work. We've been working for a number of months on a new version of the My-Opquast tool. There will be a lot of fundamental changes and a whole new ranges of features will appear. We'll be giving you more information when we launch it but here is a quick preview of what is planned:

• The Opquast best practices list is useful to you for your site, but at the same time you want to elaborate your own lists of quality control criteria? With the new version you will be able to create your own personalized lists and carry out evaluations based on the lists you create.
• While carrying out a quality evaluation on your site, you will come across points that need checking and things that need to be done. With the new My-Opquast tool you will be able to create a list of tasks for each project which will be accessible to all the members of your team.
• During a quality evaluation process the new ajax based interface makes things clearer and will enable you to go a lot faster. You will also be able to personalize your work area.
• You want the possibility of team work, with developers, clients, consultants and associates? With the new system all the evaluations will be multi-user based and the project specific RSS feeds are still in place.
• You find the new generation of Web services interesting but few are accessible and you get the impression that you might end up captive of the company that is providing the service? With Opquast all the evaluation results can be exported in a number of industry standard formats. With regards to accessibility the entire interface will provide the same features even if Javascript is disabled in your browser.
• Some subscriptions, apart from making it possible to create more than one list and more projects than in the free subscription, will also make it possible to configure and publish a service provider profile which will be accessible to all users through a search engine on th Opquast site.
• If you think that Opquast and the My-Opquast tool are a good idea and you believe that they should be used outside of francophone countries, don't despair: in a couple of weeks Opquast and My-Opquast will go on-line in French and English too.

Be ready it's all coming soon. We'll keep you posted.