Going Live
Ready to launch your new website? Take a look at the following list to ensure that
you cover all of the major areas to
test and review before going live:
Content Quality
Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract visitors to continue to come back to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.
- Make sure techniques from the writing for the web page are used to make content easier to skim (headings, bullet points, brief paragraphs, etc.)
- Website content follows best practices recommended for each content type (people, events, news, FAQs)
- All content is up-to-date and accurate
- Content is marked-up semantically/correctly
Pages
- Titles of pages are brief and clear
- The landing page for each section has content, not just the subpages
- Test pages or unnecessary pages have been deleted or unpublished
- All pages have been checked for consistent layout, including search results page
Proofreading
Read everything. Even if you鈥檝e already read it, read it again. Get someone else to read it. There鈥檚 always something you鈥檒l pick up on and have to change. See if you can reduce the amount of text by keeping it specific. Break up large text blocks into shorter paragraphs. Add clear headings throughout, and use lists so that users can scan easily. Don鈥檛 forget about dynamic text too, such as alert boxes. Take a look at the Writing for the web section for detailed guidelines.
- Content is free of spelling and grammatical errors
- Style of writing is consistent across the site
- Capitalization (especially for pages and headings) is consistent
- University related buildings, centers, degrees, and positions are written and capitalized correctly
- Treatment of bulleted lists is consistent (e.g. using periods at end of list items)
- Check for incorrect punctuation marks, especially apostrophes, quotation marks and hyphens/dashes
- Tense is consistent (within a page)
- Tone is consistent (within a page or section)
Images (see image guidelines page)
- All images have alt-text
- Text is not displayed as an image, except in the case of logos, charts, or infographics
- Images on each page have the desired alignment and are sized correctly
- Images uploaded to slideshows fit and are positioned correctly (e.g. a subject鈥檚 head is not covered by an overlay)
Links
Don鈥檛 just assume all your links work. Click on them. You may often forget to add 鈥渉ttp://鈥� to links to external websites. Make sure your image link to the appropriate places. Also, think about how your links work. Is it obvious to new users that they are links? They should stand out from the other text on the page. Don鈥檛 underline text that isn鈥檛 a link because it will confuse users.
Responsiveness
Check to make sure content you have created is Mobile 鈥� Tablet responsive. This means
that the content of your page is resized and rendered to fit the screen of the output
device. Templates developed for use in the content management system are designed
to be responsive along with most of the assets and snippets. You may use the link
below to check if your newly created page is responsive.
Functionality Check
Test everything thoroughly. If you have a contact form, test it and copy yourself so that you can see what comes through. Get others to test your website. Sit back and watch how a user uses the website. It鈥檚 amazing what you鈥檒l pick up on when others use your website differently than how you assume they鈥檇 use it.