Website Testing, Testing, and more Testing...

A website is something that is constantly being updated and modified, so why shouldn't you constantly be testing it? There is nothing worse then hearing from a visitor or client that something on your site not working correctly. You want to be sure you find those "faults" first, not last.

What's so bad about a little error?
How little is the error? That's usually a question that doesn't have such a definitive answer. The error may seem little to you, but you may not know about the handful of visitors that left your site because of it. Perhaps those visitors were ready to order, or make a call but got frustrated, that's not a good thing for your bottom line. So that little error is now a very big error.

How do I catch everything?
You may not be able to catch everything, but you can certainly do things to help catch a majority of things. One very important practice would be to surf your website once or twice a day (at the beginning and end of the work day). Try different paths and make sure you can always get around and back to where you came from. Another approach would be to randomly have your employees surf the site. Just shoot John an email on Tuesday that says, "before the end of the day I would appreciate it if you could surf through our website as if you were a customer to make sure you don't run across any errors. Please inform me as soon as you have completed your surfing and whether you found anything or not." This approach gives you a fresh set of eyes that may catch something you wouldn't have.

Testing may lead to something new
During the course of your testing you may think of things, or your employees may think of things that will help to improve the site. It doesn't always have to be that something is wrong, but it could be that something could be a little bit better.

Remember: What may seem insignificant to one person, may be extremely significant to someone else.

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Ignite MediaLLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
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