Are you looking at your current website and wondering what went wrong? Maybe while you know you need a new website, you’re also remembering how poorly the last one launched and the problems it created for you and your customers. When we talk to clients about their current and past websites, we see a trend: most problems could have been caught—if the website had been reviewed before launch. So let’s talk quality assurance and web development!
Understanding Website Quality Assurance
Quality assurance (QA), also known as quality control, is a set of procedures a business puts in place to ensure the product it produces works and is free of flaws before it ships. For a manufacturer, this might mean spot inspections of product samples to make sure they are free of defects. For a website, this means making sure the website is ready to launch, from form to function, and that once launched, it’s in a working state.
Why Every Website Needs Thorough Review
What separates your current website from an ideal website? You might already know you need a better website for your customers, but there are key places any website has to work not only for customers but for search engines, these include:
- Functionality: The website needs to work. This includes everything from menu links that work to videos that play. Reviewing each link might be tedious, but broken pages turn away customers.
- Content: The images and page copy need to all be present. Images need to be the best ones available and ones you have the rights to (and no watermarks). Written copy needs to be free of errors.
- Formatting: Everything needs to come together into cohesive pages that look and work well. Headers, margins, background colors, and accent images: it all has to come together on desktop and mobile without issues.
- Metadata: Search engines use metadata to read your site, and good metadata means your page ranks better. Meta titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, and sitemaps are all vital to showing up on Google.
How We Review Websites at Vision
Every website Vision builds for customers is unique, built to the tastes of the client, their needs, their industry, and the marketing goals set in collaboration with us. Depending on time and budget, they might create their own website content, port it from an existing site, or have us write it for them. Once the site is nearing completion, we start reviewing. Clients usually review the first drafts of a website, either before or after launch, depending on their involvement in the project.
Pre-Launch Website Review
Websites are reviewed using page-specific checklists (a home page might also check headings and footers, while a blog page might check feed configuration). Quality assurance reviews copy for errors, checks links, and usually creates metadata during this process. Once all pages are reviewed and any changes made, the website can launch.
Post-Launch Website Review
Once the website launches, it’s time for celebration—but also time to make sure everything came over on the launch successfully. Most websites are built on developer sites, meaning the URLs differ from the final ones, and while they will mostly switch over automatically, it’s important to check. Post-launch QA is shorter, focusing mostly on functionality and formatting.
All of this is a painstaking effort and one that few marketing agencies—even just website developers—go to, leaving it largely to their clients (and the client’s customers) to find issues. At Vision, we believe in providing care with everything we have a hand in, from major website projects to single social media posts. We’d love to talk to you about your current website and marketing and how you can improve them together. Contact us today to start talking.
