There’s often a rush and limited timescales when it comes to launching a new website or updates. It’s likely you’ve spent a lot of hard work and hours creating and designing a website that offers an exceptional customer experience, but if it can’t be used correctly then it automatically becomes ineffective. Testing guarantees your website is well received and meets the expectations your clients had for it.
Web development is a delicate coding process in which many things can go wrong. It makes sense to ensure that testing this development is a necessary part of the website build process.
Here at A&P, my role is to test both the back end of the website, followed by the front end. In practice, this means testing the functionality of a website first of all: are the form tables saving correctly; do all the links work; is it possible to create new pages and datablocks and then save them?
Once the functionality of the website is secure, we then test the front end, which is how the website appears to the user. We evaluate the website on a small-sized laptop, a large PC monitor, tablets and various mobile phone devices. We use an application called Browserstack to test the website on any handhelds or tablets we don’t have to hand in the office.
Testing throughout the build process allows our websites functionality to improve and has helped ensure clients see a finished product when the website CMS is handed over. Testing has helped us become more aware of some of the bugs within the templates we use and within a new CMS. This has assisted in making the process both faster and smoother.
The future of back-end testing lies in automated testing: using software and writing scripts to test the functionality of a website. For front-end testing however, manually checking how a website looks on a specific device is the best and most accurate way to make sure the website matches up to the agreed visuals.
Web design isn’t a place for fixed ideas. It’s a world that requires strategic understanding, creative thinking and an open mind. That’s why we get to know you, your users and your objectives before we start doing anything at all.
If a new website or website refresh is on your mind, get in touch today.