Just in case you hadn’t noticed or were trying to avoid it, the buildup to Christmas is in full swing. Trees and decorations are going up in the high street, Christmas advertising is on the telly and most things will start to be accompanied with a sprig of holly, a dusting of fake snow and a mince pie.

November is often the month where website owners and managers dress the homepage of their website with the aforementioned sprig of holly and extend their seasonal good wishes. Somehow, this visual update will impress upon the visitor that Christmas is upon us and compel them to make more purchases.

I actually don’t mind the little snowmen standing next to the logo or the snowflakes, baubles and tinsel that start to adorn many a homepage at this time of the year.

But whilst you are planning these seasonal updates to spruce up your website it makes sense to carry out a thorough audit of the site at the same time.

I review and test a fair number of newly launched websites. Whilst these sites have generally undergone testing before they launched, I am often asked to review sites to give them the once over even though they are already live.

Strictly speaking, all the testing should be been done before launch but agencies and freelance web developers are often under pressure to get websites finished and live sometimes prematurely.

This means that the reviews I complete usually do result in a number of issues being found, including some fairly major ones alongside the typos and small layout bugs in different browsers.

If you are managing web projects then you will know that maintaining a high level of quality throughout the website you are producing is hard to do.

There are so many things that can go wrong, and will if they are given the chance – from small typos and grammar mistakes in the copy to broken images and links, layout problems in various web browsers and functionality either not working or not working very well.

Problems can range from being mildly annoying and a little bit frustrating to actually preventing the user from purchasing a product, finding out information about a product or service or making an enquiry.

Graphic design agencies are busy companies and there is generally a lot going on in terms of pitching for and winning work, carrying out that work, effectively account managing and directing demanding clients plus remembering to bill for everything you do.

When completing web projects, it is necessary to fully test website developments before launch but when clients need to launch by a set deadline and there are other projects vying for resources plus your project manager is already at capacity then testing often has to be done quickly, and sometimes that means that the testing is rushed.

What often happens when testing is rushed is that the quality of the website suffers. This then runs the risk of starting a series of events that can escalate starting with the new website perhaps not gaining the sales or enquiries that it was expected to due to sub-standard quality, potentially gaining bad comments on social networking sites, damaging your client’s reputation and ultimately damaging your reputation and the working relationship with your client.

In extreme cases, if there is a serious fault with the website that prevents then you may have a very unhappy client on your hands who is looking for more than the application of a fix to the problem.

Solutions

So how do you solve this problem so that you are not rushing testing and launching websites that are of the best quality possible?

Paul Halfpenny – Technical Director, Evolving Media:
‘Working with Tom and WebDepend has been a pleasure, he is always well organised, thorough and gets the job done. The main client that Tom has been working with on Evolving’s behalf is very happy with the way the work has progressed and the results achieved.

I would not hesitate in recommending WebDepend and will be considering further work to outsource to Tom in due course.’

The main bulk of the work completed on Evolving Media’s behalf, has been managing the client account for Intent Media and resulting work that emanated from that relationship, as Tom had done throughout 3 years at Evolving Media including launching 16 projects in the process.