Top Ten Things To Test Before Your Website Goes Live

When you are ready to launch your new website it is vital you spend time testing the final results, even if you have made it yourself or have paid a lot of money for it. Things do go wrong when you go from testing and building to live, so you have to take the time to sit down and test the site in full, asking friends, family and anyone else to also test the site before it gets indexed or advertised.

Below, we look at our top ten things you simply have to test before the website goes live and starts getting traffic.

Menus

Make sure your menus work, especially if they are drop downs or some other interactive type of menu. Go through and make sure all of the menus open and are in the correct order and in the right place.

Fonts

Try to be consistent and make sure all of the text is of the same font, or at least the same family of fonts. Sometimes, if you do not code the page or the CSS correctly, it can lead to having multiple font types on the page, which looks really bad and quite unprofessional unless you plan this.

Pages

If you have 10 or 100 pages, you need to click through ALL of them and make sure they work, because everyone one of these pages could become a landing page in some way so its vital you do spend the time checking all pages and just making sure everything is ok.

Images

Depending on the browser being used, you may or may not be aware of images not loading when you test your site. Firefox manages to hide non loading images very well, but Internet Explorer will give you the red cross of death, so make sure your images load and are property alt tagged up, which helps people with limited vision to use your site better.

Videos

Check the videos load quickly and completely, as a slow video will drive people away and an incomplete video will just leave users frustrated and quite annoyed that they spent time to view something that is simply not finished.

Links

If your site contains outgoing links or a lot of internal navigational links, make sure they all work by testing them before the site goes live. It is also sometimes a good idea to have a paragraph in your terms and conditions to mention that you have no control of what is contained on the site they follow the link to, as if the outgoing site gets hacked you do not want it reflecting on your business.

Contact Form

Producing a contact form is one thing, producing one that works, sends the email to you and also tells the user it has been successfully sent is another. Make sure that you test all of the contact forms on your website, which might be a time consuming exercise but a vital and definitely necessary one.

Text Details

Does your site have a phone number on it? If so, dial it and make sure it connects to you. Such a simple thing to say but there have been a few instances that we have seen where people mistype the phone number and do not spot it for a long time after, imagine how many calls you might of missed!

Browsers

It is crucial to make sure that you try your website in all of the major browsers, which include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and for Mac users, the Safari browser. Even though the two most common browsers are Internet Explorer and Firefox, Chrome and Opera have quite a loyal following so you need to make sure the site works the best it can in all browsers.

Speed

Speed is a vital aspect for any website, especially as it is now one of the ranking factors in the Google algorithm. People will not want to spend ages waiting for a site to load so its vital you make sure the pages load as quickly as possible and as fluidly as possible as well.

How To Choose The Right Web Design Company For You

Taking the step of employing a web design company to design your new website can sometimes be a daunting one, especially with hundreds of web design firms in any one area or radius to choose from. Therefore, it is vital that you do your research and make sure the company you are going to hand your money to are the best you possibly can find and ultimately will deliver you something you can be totally happy with.

Below, we look at the most important things that we believe are essential that you take into account before choosing your web design company to deliver your new website or project.

Think About Location – We believe that using a local web design company is a must if you really want to make sure that your website is delivered on time and to a very high quality. We speak from experience when we say that by using a local company you can remain on top of the project much more efficiently and having someone your can physically go and see if there are issues really is worth its weight in gold.

Ask Them For A Quote – Everyone has a budget so make sure you set yours from the outset and then contact a few web design companies for a quote. If they are well outside of your budget then it is often not worth making yourself bankrupt just to afford it. In this situation you have two choices, reduce your specification or choose a web design firm that fits your budget a bit better than the others.

Check Out Their Portfolio – A web design company should have a portfolio of work; a good web design company should have a great portfolio of work. Look at their website and then spend time checking out their previously completed projects. Make sure you like what they do and that they have a good variation of projects and good design skills, but just because you do not see something you would choose does not mean they are not any good, you need to concentrate on how good their previous designs are and how well the sites work.

Read / Request A List Of Testimonials – People love to tell the world if they have found someone good and worth working with, a web design company is no different. Check through their testimonials and request permission to contact some of the previous clients directly, many firms will allow you to do this and it is absolutely vital you do so. NEVER be embarrassed to check out how good they really are by making that phone call.

Optimised Or Just Good Looking? – A good looking website does not equal a successful website. Having something pretty and flash does not mean you will have loads of visitors making enquires and landing on your site. A good website is an optimised and ranking website, just like a high street shop is only successful if you have the visitors making the purchases within.

Meet With Them – And finally, where possible, go and meet them. There is nothing you can do that is more important than sitting down and meeting the people who will be in charge of your website. Whether you are spending £500 or £5000, you need to trust the people that are ultimately in charge of making sure your website is going to deliver something you will be proud of and above all, be successful.

Holiday Tours Website CMS

Pillow (http://www.pillow.co.uk/) is an adventure travel company. Net9design have upgraded the site adding a full CMS system in the backend to give the customer full control over the site content. Also the CMS will give the customer control over the website SEO and includes new plugins for Social media.

Based in the UK, the travel company which offers tours to major festivals and events across Europe. We offer tours to major European events like Anzac Day in France and Belgium, Tomatina or Bull Running in Spain and trips to major European Christmas markets. However we also specialise in offering tours to some of the UK’s best but also most quirky festivals & events, such as the Cheese Rolling at Coopers Hill in Gloucestershire, Shin Kicking in the Cotswolds, or Running the Tar Barrels in Devon.

This site has a special customised Event management plugin that provides a way to take online registrations for events such as conference and seminars that are held live. Events are managed quickly and easily from within the WordPress dashboard.

Visit the Adventure Travel tour company Pillow here

Powerfull content management – WordPress

We produce smaller Websites based around a customised Blog system – WordPress. This gives the benefits of a site that can be updated via a web browser by yourselves.

The basic blog is customised by us to make it appear like any other website but underneath is a powerful, customised site with full CMS system that you can add images, layouts, videos etc.

Examples of this type of site are:-

http://www.colefordtowncouncil.gov.uk/
http://roadsafety-gloucestershire.org.uk/
http://www.progressive-llp.com/
http://www.alphapropertyinvestment.com/
http://www.d-la.co.uk/
http://www.guidepoststrust.org.uk/
http://completeirrigation.co.uk/

Its real power is that it is very search engine friendly. Google loves blog sites because information is regularly updated and is fully optimised for Google. It automatically produces site maps when a new blog post is added, encouraging the search engines to come back frequently, getting your pages indexed instantly. The news items are automatically filed and users can add comments if required. It is RSS compatible to distribute the news across the internet through Push technology to users, other sites and news sites.

Does My Website Need a Content Management System?

A Content Management System, or CMS for short, is an administrative software system that allows its users, often unskilled in HTML and web development, to update, edit and create new pages on their website.

• Does your web site contain a huge number of pages and corresponding level of difficulty in keeping track of all of them?
• Does your organization rely on constant and regular web site changes, often with several people working on it?
• Do your web site contributors lack sufficient knowledge in HTML?
• Do you need to editorially review each new page before publication?

Can your company relate to any of the above scenarios? If so, using a CMS will save a lot of time, hassle and money in the long run.

Basic of a CMS
A typical CMS works like this,

1. A web design layout is designed and developed. Usually this entails a logo/banner at the top, standard navigation menus across the top, down the left side, and/or at the foot of the page, and a ‘blank’ area where content is inserted
2. This layout format is then converted into a master template for all subsequent pages. During the process of this conversion, the CMS admin backend is integrated and tested.
3. Web content producers are given access and instructions on how to add text and images to web pages automatically. Most CMS are usually very intuitive and easy to operate.
4. Each generated page is saved onto a database, for future editing or deletion.

More elaborate CMS can perform unique functions (such as archiving, built-in search engines, and mod rewrites), but basic functionality is still related to easy creation and editing of web pages.

What are the Types of CMS available?

Proprietary CMS
These systems are usually very expensive to purchase. These high end systems however come loaded with full features and usually have excellent customer and technical support. Common uses of these systems involve very large organizations with departments that require unique functionality.

Open source
These systems are typically free and relatively easy to install. Some of the better known open source systems include WordPress. Because of its open source nature however, you will find a dearth of customer and technical support, however there exists a huge following and forums dedicated to the popular systems. Customization capabilities vary from system to system.

Custom CMS
These types of systems are usually preferred as they allow you to develop from scratch, your preferred functionality. Debugging is also less of an issue as your web developer, having written the codes, can easily isolate and fix problems.

Bear in mind there are literally hundreds of CMS to choose from. Ranging in costs from free to over £500,000. What you do need to do, is firstly figuring out exactly what functionality your organization needs, your development budget and finally find a system that suits those needs best.

The downside to installing a CMS is of course, the amount of web development needed initially. While you are able to obtain free open source CMS programs, you still need to hire someone experienced and capable enough to integrate it correctly. This initial expense however, is usually a necessary evil and is justified as you avoid the need of hiring or outsourcing your webmastering needs down the road.

Search engine optimizing your CMS
If you do decide to install a CMS for your web site, the following considerations should be applied.

Mod rewrites or URL Rewrites
This ensures that your dynamically generate URLs are search engine friendly as opposed to using long session ids and strings.  A URL might be some thing like this www.mywebsite.com/?12432. They are converted into a friendly and readable  www.mywebsite.com/the-page-name.html. The search engines bots will then have no difficulty in indexing and caching these pages.

Fields for title and meta data entry
Ideally, you want to be able to insert your own title and meta tags. This applies to the alt tag code for all images as well. Using the correct keywords in these tags often provides a nice search engine rankings boost.

Sitemaps
All generated pages should be automatically inserted into your global website sitemap. This allows the search engine bots to easily find and spider all new pages.

Ultimately a CMS is meant to make life easier, not creating new rigid standards that require stop gap hacks or workaround solutions. Visualscope Studios has developed a custom CMS that can be suitably modified to meet your organisations’ needs.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation (SEO) has become vital significance to achieve higher rankings in search engines and increase the right traffic to your web site. We design all our sites firstly with search engines mind. Then use a combination of keyword research and site optimisation to make your site desirable to the search engine spiders and site visitors alike. Finally to increase site link popularity, we spawn inbound links from relevant web sites.

Online Shops

If you want to sell your products round the world or just the UK, but don’t know how to reach new customers then you will need an online shopping cart or ecommerce solution that is very affordable, easy to use, easy to customise and full of features that can be integrated into your web site.

Website Design Company

Website Design Company Net9design, Gloucester, Gloucestershire UK. You have found the right site for internet web site design and high quality graphic design services.

Based in Gloucester, we offer design studio services including multimedia flash, illustration, website design, photography and training.

We have an outstanding reputation for giving business innovative design solutions for the last 18 years.

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