User Testing Online What you should do before releasing a new website onto the world wide web

When the release of a new site is imminent, it’s important to remember that every detail counts. Neglecting to check something could cost time, money, and sanity. Each of these topics could become blog posts in themselves. So instead I have, where available, provided a tool and a short summary of why you should use it and what it does.

If you have any questions, or would like some more detail about any of these topics,

Set a go-live date early and with reasonable expectations

Don’t rush the launch of your gleaming new site only to end up creating avoidable mistakes in the process. Allow for contingency time, and clearly sign everything off so everyone knows what is happening and when.

Setting a soft go-live two weeks before the real go-live is always a good idea. This means any stakeholders can go through the site and anything that might have been missed or is in need of updating can be fixed.

Planning

Make a solid nuke proof plan. Assign tasks to all those involved, allot time for each task. If a task runs over time you’ll be fully aware of; who, when, and why the project is taking longer than anticipated so you can adjust accordingly.

To do:

Use Trello to create to dos with due dates and assign them to the relevent parties. You don’t necessarily have to use Trello – but it is free and pretty robust.

Validation

Make sure all code conforms to web standards. This needs to be done first and repeated throughout until the very end. If your code doesn’t validate, it’s not ready to go live. For a full list of useful tools, visit: http://w3c.github.io/developers/tools/.

Compatibility

Does your site render the way it should on your favorite browser? Good, now it’s time to check how it looks for everyone else.

Performance

Studies have shown that users will not tolerate more than a 4 second load time. If your site fails to offer a quick response, your users will leave. This is also a good follow-up after validation and compatibility, because it involves the same areas: checking browsers, devices, files, and folders.

Compliance and accessibility

It is important to remember that people with disabilities aren’t just blind people. Deaf people need closed captions, colour vision deficient people need bold contrasting colours, and so on.

Whilst also a legal requirement in the UK, you don’t want to exclude a huge number of

SEO

Search engine optimisation is the process of making your site as desirable as possible to search engines like Google. While not vital to some, it is definitely worth a quick audit to see how good your site looks to search engines.

• • know what your site is about.

Proof reading

This sounds obvious, but simple spelling and grammatical mistakes can easily creep in while making all these other changes.

Backup

Anything could happen. Servers don’t last forever, and hard drives fail. Be sure that all your good work doesn’t disappear.

Ready for going live

Now it is time to set up your live environment.