You know the feeling, the site is ready to launch, you’ve been working your ass off to get it done, and you want to say “Make it so #1” like Piccard on Startrek.
Before you launch, here are three things you may need to review with your team.
1. Launching on Friday
Friday seems like a great time to launch because hey, it’s the end of the week. However, going live on a Friday can be a bit tricky. What happens if the site goes down over the weekend? What if someone points out that you’ve misspelled the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? What happens if something is mislinked or broken? These types of things happen even with a throughout Q&A process.
So, make sure that you launch your site earlier in the week. That way, any small bugs caught after the fact can be addressed by the development team before they are off for the weekend.
2. Not Enough Q&A
Sometimes even with a whole team of people, bugs creep through your review. Some companies launch their site without a thorough Q&A because they are so excited to go live. Whether your website is 1 page or 100, you need to allow a reasonable amount of time to go through a thorough Q&A. An in-depth Q&A means checking the spelling, checking all the links on the page, testing forms, mobile, and interactive elements.
The checks also include any other integrations such as calendar integrations, lead capture, funnels, landing pages, CRM’s, API integrations, or automation software connected to your fancy new site.
3. Cross-Browser Checks
In the past, it used to be a lot harder to cross-check browsers for your website. There used to be a lot fewer devices than we have today. While most development teams have a standard set of checks that they run, they don’t always check across operating systems. So a PC developer might not bother testing the site on Mac, and visa versa. Chrome dominates the browser space these days, but there are many more options for users to have these days.
Make sure your developers are checking not only Google and IE but also Firefox and Safari. Mac isn’t as small of a user base as it used to be. These days there are plenty of useful emulations tools that a developer can use to make sure that even if things are working their operating system, they can still work for other users.
