CONTINUAL QUALITY ASSURANCE

Once your site is “live” and you have customers, don’t drop your QA Plan, it is just as important now. With frenetic deadlines and constantly changing requirements, it is very easy to ignore the basics of quality assurance. An active, dynamic site means your web pages will be in a continual state of change. That means that, in all probability, the pages will be revised by different people; those people will bring their own individual coding quirks, which can and will introduce HTML and other coding errors (although I am sure all will try to follow the HTML on the templates).

If your website is currently operational but was brought to the Web without a QA Plan, gather your entire staff together (including consultants) and discuss ad hoc processes and standards that you currently have in use. In these discussions find out what causes the most problems on the site. This will give you the basis upon which to set up a QA Plan to address those issues as well as HTML and other coding guidelines. It generally is not practical to try to “update” your older content to adhere to the new QA Plan, but do initiate the QA Plan for all new content.

Listen to Your Customers

Listen when you are told that a customer has problems with your website. When someone takes the time to report a problem, pay attention. For every person who took the time to inform you about the problem, there are probably about a thousand others who didn’t — remember competition is just a click away. Be diligent, pay attention and you will be one step ahead of most websites when it comes to neutralizing the little annoyances. After all, are you building your website to drive customer traffic to your competitors or to enhance your bottom line?