Have you ever had a website built from a professional Phoenix web design company? If yes, then you know that they will get it to a point then have you review the website prior to launching it. The reason that they do this is because you will understand your website better than they will. There will be issues with the website that you will find that your web design company would never have found. This can still feel like a daunting task if you have never been around web design before. There is a basic checklist of items that you can follow that should allow you to make sure your website is working perfectly before you launch your website. Even if the website appears to be working perfectly on the development site there will still be bugs after the launch so don?t be alarmed. However, a good web design company will continue to provide free support for a couple months after the launch to give you time to locate the bugs and get them fixed. Let?s take a look at the checklist that you can follow to test your website.
- Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation ? A web design company will likely move a lot of your current websites content to the new website or place content you have written for the new website. This doesn?t mean that their won?t be spelling and grammar issues. If you invested all that money in a new website then you should make sure that all the grammar issues have been fixed.
- Forms ? Make sure to check all of the forms on your website. While testing these forms you will need to make sure that they are submitting properly and that the validations are correct. You will not want people to be able to enter ?abc? for a phone number or a zip code. This also gives you an opportunity to see how your websites visitors feel when they are filling out the forms on your website. Is there anything you can do here to make it more user friendly?
- Site Speed ? We no longer live in a world where people are OK waiting 2 minutes for a website to load. Nowadays your website better load within 3 seconds or they are likely to leave. Site speed doesn?t just help you with your website visitors but also helps you with search engine optimization. The search engines have began to use site speed as a key metric in their algorithms that determine search results.
- Compatibility ? There is a many different website browsers out there and no way of telling where your visitors are going to come from. You are going to want to check at minimum the main web browsers out there such as Fire Fox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. This will help you ensure that all the visitors that visit your website will have a great user experience. You don?t want somebody to come to your website and think it is broken simply because it isn?t compatible with a certain web browser.
- Fonts ? This is one as a web designer we see all the time especially on sites that have content management systems. You will want to make sure that the fonts across the entire site are consistent. When you get multiple staff members updating the content on your website you have a variety of people thinking different font styles, colors, sizes look good. Even though they may look good individually when a user is going from page to page seeing all the different fonts it makes your website look sloppy.
- Images ? Go through your website and make sure that they not only all show up but also have title tags. The other thing you will want to make sure of when you are adding images to your website is that they are small in size. Larges images take a long time to load and will slow down your websites load time dramatically.
- URL?s ? When a website goes live the URL?s from the development website will change to the live sites domain. You will want to go through every page and make sure that there is no broken URL?s or pages. If you have a new page that doesn?t match the old URL the old page that was indexed on the search engines will show up as broken when a user finds them. This can make visitors think that your website is broken and cause them leave your website. Once they leave they will likely go to one of your competitor pages.
- 404 Pages ? When a visitor ends up stumbling on a page this isn?t there make sure you have a 404 page in place. A 404 page is a page that will help the visitor get back to a page on your website where there is content. Most 404 pages have links back to your website to help them get to one of your websites most important pages. Even if it isn?t exactly what the visitor was looking for it will definitely be a big step in helping them find what it is that they are looking for.
- Social Media Integration ? Social media is not going away anytime soon and you better embrace it. Social media offers a unique way to market to the billions of social media users around the world. So what do you need to make sure is on your website? Well, you will want to make sure all the pages have a Share This button for all the major social media websites. These buttons allow visitors to your website to share your content with their friend quickly and easily.
- Tracking ? If you are planning on doing any type of marketing you will want some sort of analytic program on your website. I would suggest you at minimum use Google Analytics. The best thing about it is that it is free and gives you in depth in sites into the traffic of your website.