Paper to Pixel

For many of you building a site is a pretty exhausting process. From all those initial meetings, discussions, research and planning to actual design process. And of course there’s the build itself, the technology bit where things usually do not go as they should which can sometimes lead to an endless rounds of revisions. So no wonder that you wait impatiently for the launch day. I guess for many of you it is like a symbolic closure date. Your client gets the website up, he can announce it to the world and you, you usually get the cheque.

The only thing is that at this very moment things can go very wrong. And they often do.
But to begin at the beginning. How the usual launch of the site looks like? In most cases you simply put the site live, make sure that everything works and let the client know. What do they do usually then? Send a newsletter to all their client base informing them of the new site. Or they do that beforehand telling them to start logging in from a certain day to check the new site.

And then the unthinkable happens. Something on the site doesn’t work, there are typos omitted in the final check. A script you used doesn’t want to run properly on some older browsers, some layout elements fall apart on them as well. And the worst thing is that you and the client find out all that from the site’s first visitors. The very people who came there invited by the newsletter.

There’s probably no point even in saying how stressful and embarrassing at the same time it is. Many of you have probably gone through that and still have trembles at a thought of that call you got from a client.

So, how could this be avoided?

Simply, persuade your client to hold off with announcing the site on the day of the launch. Instead do a soft launch. Put the site live but instead of sending a newsletter invite only few people to check the site out.  Close friends, relatives or coworkers are usually the best. They will definitely be honest and put effort in testing the site thoroughly.

Alternatively put the site live on a test server and give those people access to it. Either way is good as long as you have real visitors using the site. Such live user tests may reveal many bugs and typos, things you or the client couldn’t spot in the pre-launch madness.

Give yourself and the client time to correct those. Usually a week of live testing is enough, although with bigger sites you may need more time.

And remember, you will always skip a typo while testing yourself. No matter how much time you will spend testing the site on all browsers you will still skip some functionality or layout issues. Let’s face it, very often this is all done as a last element of the process and you may be rushing through it.

Real users on the other hand will pick all those things straight away.

And only then, after testing period is over and all those small bits corrected let your client send that newsletter and launch the site officially. And at this moment there is much greater chance that your client will not hear about bugs and site elements that do not work from their clients.
Actually he might not hear about them at all.