There’s nothing worse than putting your website out there for the world to see, only to realise that there are embarrassing typos, or broken links. Giving your website one last go-over before going live can help ensure your business puts its best face forward. Here’s our checklist for what to look out for before your website launches.
Go through your website in minute detail
Put aside the time to go through every individual page on your site and make sure:
✔spelling, grammar and punctuation is correct
✔ the content matches your brand guidelines and tone of voice
✔ all your links are working and direct users to the right pages
✔ content is presented in a logical order (i.e. use h1 / h2 / h3 tags)
✔ navigation levels work and do not break or change across different pages
✔ applications and forms work properly (to test this, perform a search or fill out a form and see how it works)
✔ images are suitable and match the captions/context of the page
✔ images have appropriate descriptive alt text.
This is a big task, so we’d suggest you ask people familiar with your business to help. Because they know your business too, they can help confirm that all your information and branding is consistent.
Get friends to check your website for you
When you’ve been involved in the build of a website it is sometimes difficult to gauge how it looks to an outsider. You know where all the features are because you put them there. But will your customers be able to find them too?
If you’re a small business, user testing doesn’t have to be a big deal. Find ten willing participants, perhaps friends and family, and give them 5 tasks to perform on your site without your help, such as:
- filling out a customer feedback form
- signing up to the newsletter
- finding a specific product
- locating your business phone number
- learning a specific piece of information
See how long it takes them to perform these tasks, and ask them how they found navigating your website. They will be able to give you an honest, objective opinion of how the site reads, how it works, and whether they thought it was easy to use.
Manage revisions effectively and efficiently
Understandably, this editing process can be very confusing. Managing electronic changes and feedback can become complicated. Marking your changes down physically on paper can help minimise the confusion.
As you go through your website section by section (i.e. Home, About us, Services etc) print the page out and mark down your notes/corrections in pen. You can then pass these hard-copy changes to your web developer so that they can see exactly which sections you’re referring to. Make sure they notify you once the changes are done.
Don’t hesitate to do a third, fourth or even fifth proofread of the content to ensure all is correct.
If writing quality content for your website is taking up too much of your time, get the team at Shuttle Rocket to help. With our one, three and five page copywriting packages (as well as blog post options) you’ll be ready to launch in no time.