Chad’s Blog
Pragmatic Technologies for Life and Business Success®
In an article I wrote some time ago, To infinity & beyond – Nine practical techniques to take your web site to the next level, I emphasized the importance of effectively testing your web site. This means that you need to test your site not only when you are ready to launch it for the first time but also when you make frequent changes to it. Let me show an example:
You may already know that when typing a web address in your browser you may save the amount of keystrokes and elect to take a shortcut. This means that you do not need to include the “http://www.” or the “www.” before the domain name. So for example, if I wish to enter this blog name in my browser I may type “chadbarr.com” instead of “www.thechadbarrgroup.com” or instead of the entire “htttp://www.chadbarr” which is often used by many.
Some time ago, a colleague recommended I check the blog by David Meerman Scott who also wrote the book The New Rule of Marketing & PR which I highly recommend. I launched by browser and typed “webinknow.com” and got this error screen suggesting the domain name I type was not found:
Upon further search on Google I found the blog I was looking for:
I then realized that the person who set up the blog did not take into consideration setting it up in such a way that enables visitors to type the shortcut into your browser. No big deal you may say, and although I may slightly agree, why not make it easy for your visitors to find your sites and reduce the chance of annoyance or creating the wrong assumption that your site is down or does not exist?
I then decided to visit David’s main site. When I got to his home page (as displayed below) I was unable to click on the top right two links which are the Blog and Bio options although they both worked on the interior pages.
This error is quite common in my experience and I am not suggesting that I am immune of it in our own work. But I do suggest however is that if it happens to the best of us it may happen to you as well. Why not take the extra few seconds and test your sites thoroughly and on an ongoing basis?
© Chad Barr 2009. All rights reserved.
Chad,
Ours works! Although that shouldn’t surprise you, right?
I totally agree with you on the importance of making sure everything link works properly on a website.
You may only get one chance to impress someone so don’t miss that opportunity by giving that someone the impression that you don’t check your work.
John,
Thanks for the comment and for stopping by. For the sake of others, I just want to clarify that when you say: “Ours works!” you mean your terrific web site found here: http://www.ariestech.com/ which I am somewhat subjective about, having something to do with it 🙂
But getting back on track, yes, testing should be a critical phase of web development or software development in your case. I have just delegated the responsibility of quality control to one of my staff members which will help in the testing of the many projects we are working on.
Would love to hear your comments about effective ways of testing.