The Testing Phase
The website has been built. It looks great on your computer, but what about others? Does the contact form display correctly on all browsers and does that all important email enquiry get sent to the right email address? – You get the idea, testing is essential – it is also pretty boring and you will find that a lot of web design companies are quite egotistical.
They think that they do not make mistakes – and we are all guilty of this. You MUST ensure that your web design company takes testing seriously and checks for bugs, browser interoperability issues and tests the website with/without JavaScript enabled.
To ensure your website is tested fully, your new website designer should go through the following:
Create Quality Assurance (QA) Plan
No matter how small/large your website is, a QA plan should be in place. It outlines how different browsers, platforms and operating systems are going to be tested – and can be as simple as offering a checklist of possible bugs.
Conduction of QA Plan
Testing should be done in various stages – initially internally (by your website designer) followed by your team and potential end users.
We are not being unrealistic – testing levels really do depend on budget and resources but the main aim is to identify bugs and errors – try and break the website and see what happens. It is inevitable that errors will popup now and then so ensure that nice looking error pages are uploaded to the server to make the errors look more user friendly.
NOTE – to make testing a bit easier on your web design company, why not recommend using XXXX – this is an automated bug tracking software that automatically makes a note whenever an error appears – and will both them and your business time in the long run (trust us)
Prioritise Fixes
Your business has deadlines – and no doubt, it will need your new website by a certain date/time. Depending on the overall project progress, it may be important for your web design company to prioritise fixes to ensure the overall project deadline is met.
Conduct Final Check
This is exactly what it says on the tin – your website design company checking over the website one last time to ensure that it works 100%. Once this is done, you should be asked to signoff the overall site and confirm that it is ready for launch.
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