Things You Need to Review Before Going Live
1. Content
(i) Spelling and Grammar Consistency
- Capitalization (especially of main headings)
- Tense/Style of writing
- Recurring/common phrases (e.g. ‘More about X’ links)
(ii) Ensure No Test Content on Site
It’s not a great look when someone finds a post called “Hello World” or a paragraph saying “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.”
Find it. Trash it.
(iii) Check all ‘Hidden Copy’
Such as alt text, transcriptions, text in JavaScript functions etc.…
(iv) Proof Read
Read everything. Even if you’ve already read it, read it again. Get someone else to read it. There’s always something you’ll pick up on and have to change.
2) Design
(i) Favicon
A favorites icon is a small square image or logo that appears next to a web address. You can find favicons on your browser tabs, as well as on browser pages that list web addresses.
(ii) Responsive website design
Responsive Web Design makes your web page look good on all devices (desktops, tablets, and phones).
Use these tools to check your site on different resolutions:
- Responsinator
- Studio Press
(iii) Images
Check image pixelization on different displays, specifically high-resolution displays like Apple’s Retina Display
(iv) 404 Pages and Defensive Design
If a user requests a page that doesn’t exist, your 404 page is displayed.
3) Testing
(i) User Testing
This is important as customers drop unusable websites to go to competitors. Even testing with 5 users can find 85% of the usability issues.
(ii) Performance Testing
Website performance is absolutely critical to overall user experience, especially given the prevalence of mobile and responsive websites.
Here are some tools that you will find helpful:
(iii) Responsive Testing
Check all style types:
- Paragraph
- Headings
- Unordered Lists
- Ordered Lists
- Images
- Videos
- etc…
Use these tools to check your site on different resolutions:
(iv) Mobile Device Testing
You can use the responsive testing tools mentioned above to do initial mobile testing, but they are not perfect. To really see how your site looks on various mobile devices, you got to load it up manually.
(v) Contact form
A contact form is included with websites mainly with an intention to allow users to communicate with the site administrator, sharing their feedback/messages regarding the website. So test your contact form is sharing proper information or not
Set a Launch Date
Give yourself more time than you think unless you have done this before.
