So you’ve spent weeks and weeks preparing your website and it’s ready to go live.
The process started all that time ago as a long meeting in a hot stuffy office where the site’s requirements were thoroughly hashed out. You then moved on to negotiate costings with your web designers and developers, whittling away at the spec until the job fitted into your budget.
Now you can see the fruits of those long long laborious hours spent staring at a blank screen whilst you were meant to be producing copy. You’re proud of how the copy flows despite the keywords you’ve discreetly nestled in to boost your SEO.
The design is fantastic, it even looks like a ‘real’ website and at long last you can approve the demo site and tick this big task of your to-do list and move onto your next juicy project.
But… STOP!!
We don’t need to tell you that your website is (arguably!) the most important communication tool your company has. As the first point of contact for most of your customers, stakeholders and even future employees it’s important that it’s spot on, from the off.
We produce websites for a wide range of clients and always recommend that thorough checks are made before a site is approved. There would be nothing worse than all those hours of work and money wasted because visitors can’t see how to contact you or disappear after following a link which doesn’t open in a new window.
To save you that heartache, here is our checklist of key points you should consider before asking your web developers to set your new site live:
1. Check that all the links work (and where relevant open in a new window)
2. Proof the copy. Then proof it again! (especially headlines, subtitles and footer copy)
3. Has a contact form been included, does it work? And more importantly, is the correct person receiving the notification emails?
4. Are all the telephone numbers featured correct?
5. Has your analytics packages been set up?
6. Can you navigate back to the homepage from every page?
7. Are all the pictures correct and free of watermarks?
8. Is your registered company information displayed clearly?
9. Have you included links to your social media platforms?
10. Have you informed your web developers of ALL the domains that need repointing?
11. Do all downloads included work?
12. Have you tested the accessibility functionality to ensure contrast/text size changes operate as intended?
Once you’ve made these final checks, you’re ready to launch your website and sit back to admire all your hard work. Congratulations!
