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Website QA: A Worksheet for Nixing the Glitches
WEBSITE QA: A WORKSHEET FOR NIXING THE GLITCHES
Quality Assurance, or QA, for a website is about finding and eliminating troublesome glitches, omissions, and errors before your site’s visitors have to deal with them; or more likely, refuse to deal with them and go elsewhere in a hurry for what they need.
It’s also about ensuring you have excellent, effective content that works for you 24/7.
Doing QA right means examining every aspect of your site, as we’ll discuss here.
Why is website QA so important, anyway?
The time and effort exerted, usually by multiple parties, to design and build your site, its content, and its functionality show that a digital hub is a high priority for your business. And rightly so because, for most businesses, the first and primary place they interact with customers or clients is online.
So, the importance of making your digital interactions the best they can be, from the second those visitors land on your organization’s site, can’t be overstated.
And making sure they land there quickly is an essential part of website QA, too. As a Google survey showed, 53% of users will bounce from a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
Proper QA can ensure that, once they’re on your site, they won’t have to grapple with problems while viewing and using your content. Which is good because, as the statistic above shows, they won’t grapple long—and will probably go elsewhere to find a better experience.
QA is your friend. Not only for those vital reasons, but for another just-as-vital, connected reason: Your reputation—it’s priceless and can be damaged when your site doesn’t serve visitors well.
So, let’s take a look at the website elements that need to be inspected before your big “go live” day arrives.
The Elements of QA for Websites
Quality assurance that ensures a polished, smoothly running website covers the following:
- Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling. (As writers, we can’t help listing this first.) Well-written, error-free content reflects professionalism, which visitors extrapolate to how well you know your business.
- Completeness and Accuracy. Has anything been left out in the process of transferring your original copy as written to digital format? Does something need to be added? Are there inaccuracies caused by “dummy copy” that was left unchanged?
- Visual Consistency. Both for branding purposes and ease of use, it’s important to keep the fonts, text sizes and colors, alignment, and spacing consistent throughout your site.
- Adaptation to Any Device. Not all browsers read website code the same.Your site should appear and function consistently on any device your visitors choose. Users may give up if your content doesn’t look or work right on their smartphones or laptops.
- Browser Friendliness. Your content must also appear and work right on all the browsers your visitors are likely to use. Even some lesser-known browsers can get significant traffic, and you don’t want to lose those users between “cracks” in your site’s compatibility.
- Simple, Effective Graphics. Keep them uncomplicated and avoid using too many, but make the ones you do use are interesting, useful, and worth the space they occupy.
- Easy Navigation. Viewers should be able to flash between your pages at will.
- Links That Work. Malfunctioning links are discouraging and are not a good sign to your visitors.
- Functioning Forms. Onsite customer forms should be easy to complete and should make it to their destination. Forms are all about function—you want them to grab information and say, “Thank you.”
- E-Commerce Friendliness. If you’re selling anything on the Web, your purchasing gateway, customer account set-up, ticketing, or reservation systems must work, and work fast.
- SEO for High Rankings. Well-chosen and well-placed keywords plus authoritative, original, and useful content will help your site’s pages land near the top of search results—where you want to be.
- Security for Visitors. Last, but decidedly not least, are the security features your site uses to protect your visitors and business.
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Website QA Worksheet
All the categories just discussed are covered in this tool. It’s a detailed list to help ensure that all your site’s QA-related “boxes” are—literally—checked before your site goes live for your customers’ or clients’ eyes.
Copy it, modify it as needed, add your own business-specific notes to it, and then use it to ensure everything looks great and runs smoothly, no matter where and how users access your site.
I. Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling
For each page:
II. Completeness and Accuracy
For each page:
III. Visual Consistency
IV. Adaptation to Any Device
V. Browser Friendliness
VI. Simple, Effective Graphics
VII. Easy Navigation and Links That Work
VIII. Functioning Forms
IX. E-Commerce Friendliness
X. SEO for High Rankings
XI. Security for Visitors
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