Website Design: Quality Assurance

From our perspective, quality assurance is a subset of the overall usability goal—after all, a website isn't usable if it isn't working.

Quality Assurance is an important step in the website development process and, by all means, should not be skipped. A broken link or a misspelled word may seem like trivial mistakes, but they can greatly undermine the credibility of your website. You want people who visit your site to feel assured of the quality of the information they find.

Your company should come up with its own set of guidelines to follow. The guidelines should address editorial, graphics, and coding conventions. After the site has been built, it should be put through a rigorous post-production process. Finally, there should be a provision for user feedback which can influence the ongoing maintenance of the site.

Some areas to cover in your own quality assurance checklist include:

1. Content
   • spelling, grammar, mechanics
   • all critical information is present
   • titles, headers, and navigation labeled correctly
2. Documentation
3. Graphics and layout
   • image quality
   • download time
   • text layout
   • alignment of elements
   • color accuracy
4. Browser compatibility
   • check on different platforms
   • check on different browsers
5. User preference compatibility
   • font size
   • link colors and underlining
   • plug-ins
   • window size