Web Site Design Tips - Making Sure It All Works

In our final installment of our series on web site design tips, we're going to tie everything together, literally. The most important thing about web site design is to make sure that everything works the way it's supposed to. Depending on how extensive your web site is, that could be anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks of work. This article, while in no way all inclusive, will point out some of the main things that you will want to check before making your site go live.

The first thing you want to check for is broken links and orphan pages. These are links that either have been created improperly, or point to pages that you either didn't upload or renamed. The more pages you have in a site, the harder this is to do, especially if you have a lot of anchor text within the content itself. There are free link checking tools that you can use online to check all the links to your pages. Simply type in the main URL of the site and the tool will do the rest. This is probably the most important thing you can do in checking your web site.

The next thing you want to do is to make sure that all your images load correctly. Many times, we'll upload images to our site and the particular program we're using to upload those images will change the extension from lower to upper case. Well, photo.jpg is not the same as photo.JPG and if the image loads one way and you're looking for it another way, the image will not be found by the page.

Another problem with images is that many times, when we are designing a site using a web authoring tool like Dreamweaver or Front Page, the editor will insert a path into the image that you didn't intend to use on the live site. This path will usually come from the directory on your hard drive where you are storing the project itself. So make sure that all the URLs for each image are correct or they also won't be found.

Another thing you want to completely test out before letting your page go live is forms. If you have forms on your site for people to opt into in order to get reports or downloads, you must test them first to make sure that they are working. This is simple enough to do by just entering your own information into the form and making sure that you receive all the information that you're supposed to get. Once you've confirmed this, then you can go live with it.

By no means is this list all inclusive as each web site has its own individual characteristics. So what you need to do is go through every page and first make sure that all the visuals appear correctly. Then you have to make sure that you can get from page to page from each entry point. Finally, anything on your site that is interactive, you need to make sure that they are functioning. As I said, this can take a few hours to a few weeks. But take the time to do it correctly and your visitors will appreciate the effort by returning to your site over and over again.

To YOUR Success