Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

If you’ve ever completed a “walk through” at the end of a construction project, you’ll know what this feels like. After a construction project, you’ll want to make sure that the paint didn’t drip, that the windows and doors close properly, and that the floor is straight. Oh - and that the light switches work, so does the garbage disposal and so on. But if you’ve ever been through this process, you know that there is some give and take. At NPower Seattle, we like to review two major areas:

Design and Function

The design part is both the easiest and the hardest. Since every computer monitor is different – the sizing and color won’t always be uniform. Still – if you asked for a certain shade of blue, and the coder turned it into green – that needs to be fixed! During this review, you’ll need to repeat the work that you did with your designer – basically – you need to do a compare and contrast with the initial design. Here are some quick tips for things to look for:
• Are things lined up like they were in the design?
• Are all of the elements present – boxes around words, graphics on the pages, your logo, and so on?
• Do the colors match?
• If there are any graphics that contain words – are they spelled correctly?

Function - this is harder – since this may be the first time you’ve seen how your site works, as opposed to how it looks! Here are some things that you should check:

• Click on every navigation item to make sure it takes you where you want to go!
• Make sure that hovering over text, drop down menu items and the like display properly.
• Make sure that there aren’t any links that are “orphans” that take you somewhere and won’t let you go back!
• Does your “contact us” form submit to the right email address?
• Does the calendar work properly?
• Can people sign up, register, pay?
• Do you have editing control over all of the areas you are supposed to? You’ll want to send this information to your vendor or contractor in a concise way - and a bug report is a great way to do that!