Courtesy: Mattox
You’ve made it through your test plan, the client has signed off on the design and the project, now you need to make sure that the site is ready for public viewing. Here’s a list of tests and checks to perform before flipping the switch and letting the client (or yourself) start promoting the site.
Some visitors to your site may have disabled their browser from activating enbedded javascript in your pages. If the majority of your site uses javascript for AJAX calls or even Google Analytics a visitor that has this disabled will either not see anything or see a seemingly broken site that isn’t laid out very well. The short cut for this is to throw in a <noscript> tag and just show the user a simple message stating that the site requires javascript. If the information provided on the site isn’t dependant on javascript, make sure you have alternate pages or elements in place to show users without javascript.
If a visitor to your site depends on the use of a screen reader they still need the ability to have a relevant experience. Is your text in the right order. If you disable CSS you should see the page in a top-bottom layout. Reading through the content, each section should be consistent with each of its elements. A quick example: Is the comment link or text area for a post in the same area as the content itself? If not, you should fix that. The same goes for essential images on the page.
Using the Web Developer Toolbar you can set images to display their alt tags. These tags are used by screen readers to convey what the picture’s context is. I used the word ‘essential’ in the section above because providing alt tags for imags used for styling and layout can make a page seem noisy using a reader. The other reason to use alt tags on images is in case the visitor has images disabled by default on their browser. the alt text is displayed in place of the image, and helps with layout of the page. Again, using alt tags in layout related images can make the page look noisy, and relevant information can get lost in the shuffle.
The function of these little icons in the address bar is to identify the site visually within bookmarks and tabs. They are only 16×16 pixels, but you can easily shrink your logo down. There are two different formats of favicons. A browser typically looks for a favicon.ico. the iPhone looks for favicon.png. You can easily have both in your site. The favicon is cached by default in your browser, so you may need to clear your cache and restart your browser to see it.
There are two ways to check your site for W3C compliancy. The first way is to use the Web Developer Toolbar that I mentioned above under the Tools menu, the second is to go to http://validator.w3.org/ and enter your URL. This check uses the strictest HTML vaidation. Why is this important? Some browsers are more sensitive to valid HTML than others. Most of the time a tag that doesn’t have a complimentary ending tag is compensated by the browser. Opera is a good example of a browser that doesn’t do well with some invalid HTML. Fix the errors that the validator comes across, it’s worth it.
There are a lot of resources out there that give statistics regarding what web browsers are the most popular. You can use these, go by client requirements, or use your own judgment (don’t do that). The most popular browsers are FireFox 3, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6. If you can get your site working in each of those you’re probably good for almost all of you. Since your can’t really be sure who is going to try to access your site at any one time, you should make the majority of them work. I’m not saying you need to do a full functional test on each (except for javascript differences between IE and Firefox) you should be fine. Here’s a quicklist of browsers you should test for:
- Windows
- Mozilla Firefox
- Google Chrome
- Internet Explorer 7
- Internet Explorer 6 (most places have removed support for this and a lot of developers have started charging extra for it)
- Internet Explorer 8 (It’s coming, but you can set the IE7 meta tag)
- Internet Explorer 9
- Macintosh
- Safari
- Mozilla Firefox
- Google Chrome
You can also test on Opera, Camino, Flock, and the list goes on. The most important thing to consider is your audience. If you are running a mobile site, you should focus more on phone browsers than desktop browsers.
If you have a dynamic site that displays information relevant to the user, you depend on cookies to display relevant information to your visitors. Same goes for member based sites. You should push a message to the visitor when your site detects the usage of cookies. There are multiple ways to do this for any of the programming languages you are using. The most common is to do a javascript check for cookies and display a message back to the user.
Are you launching a multi-page site linked to internal and external sources? You should probably click on the links. Visitors can become frustrated and not want to visit your site if they constantly come across a broken link. There are a few tools available for this check. The Web Developer Toolbar has a link checker, but really, it pales in comparison to Xenu’s abilities. Use whatever you feel comfortable with, if you don’t have a lot of navigation items, clicking on the links yourself work fine too.
One of the most frustrating pages to see as a visitor to your site are server generated error messages. Not only is this an annoyance to users, but it can be a security vulnerability. Servers identify themselves in their error messages by default, which gives a clue-in to what server is being run as well as the version of the installation. That information can be used against your site by a malicious user that looks up that server version’s flaws. What you can do is set your server to redirect errors to specific pages. You have style and messaging control over these pages. Even 3xx and 5xx error messages can be forwarded.
- Site Search
- SSL (HTTPS): You should setup this information if users store private information on your site.
- Google Analytics
- CSS Validation
- RSS Feed Setup and working
- Content check (Spellcheck, Lorem Ipsum text replacement, etc…)
- Site Map (This works well to have on the error pages as well)
Keep in mind that the purpose of launching the site is to provide information and function to the visitors and revenue or sharing opportunities for your clients or yourself.
–dez
