Tim Cooke Shares His Knowledge
Quality Assurance
In fact we all do QA all of the time without realising it – You use spell checker before sending your emails or Word document and look at the ‘sell by’ date when buying milk or sandwiches from the garage forecourt, right? That’s all QA of some sort.
Having started with its conception and nurtured its development every solution we provide goes through a thorough QA process before it is launched to ensuring that it works as it should of course, that all the links point to the right place, all the images display, videos don’t get stuck, but also that it complies with both user and legal criteria.
Websites, email and any online communication is covered by UK, EU and wider legislation which of course never stands still itself. Some examples of this legislation are the need to clearly state somewhere on the site your trading status, Company registration and Vat Number, and your contact details by post and by phone.
If you are selling something or offering a subscription service, even if free like a newsletter – you should have an up to date Terms and Conditions of usage to protect yourself and you must require users to accept these before obtaining the service – these can be quite complex and require significant research or even legal advice as to what legislation currently applies e.g. Distance Selling Regulations.
As this is specific to your company, as part of our QA we would ensure that these areas are addressed but the content and compliance would be your responsibility to compile and maintain.
Browsers:
Five years ago there were really only 2 commonly used browsers in common usage – Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape Navigator which rendered any given webpage slightly differently, so web designers commonly used 2 styles – one for each so they looked near identical – or kept a ‘simple’ site layout.
Now of course we have far more flashy graphics, embedded video, fancy effects – visitors expect far more engagement and interaction.
Currently there are 3 versions of Internet Explorer 6 to 8 plus 2 versions of Firefox plus Chrome and Opera, then Mac users have Safari, Firefox and Camino – that’s over 9 years in age – each user will expect a site to look perfect in their browser else they are likely to claim the site is faulty.
Developers now spend a lot of time ensuring the near identical appearance which then has to be verified in the QA process by checking through any new site in these browsers.
Many sites more than 4 years old can also suffer as they were developed before all of the modern browsers and so suddenly ‘break’ when viewed in a new version and fixing that can then cause furthur differences between the versions.
Monitors are getting bigger as well as cheaper so sites have to be usable in the lower resolution 1024×768 plus still look good when ‘zoomed out’ to say 1600×1200 used for many laptops and widescreens with the text being comfortably readable at both extremes.
Another issue to consider more recently, is that of smart phones (I-phone, Blackberry’s etc) and how they display websites – one of the key current issues being the war between Adobe and Apple. Apple (I-Phones) don’t currently allow Flash technology to work on their systems. Flash is used so widely now and is so well supported that this poses a real issue. We do have a range of smart phones as part of our testing suite in-house however and depending on the brief of the project, these are additional platforms to test and check.
Accessibility
During the dvelopment of a new website, we ensure that the site complies with all current legislation known to us, in particular the 1995:2005 Disability Discrimination Act. There is an international standard of accessibility compliance laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium and our work is developed to the recognised W3C WAI Levels. We usually work to a minimum AA standard, which exceeds the legal UK requirements and meets the recommended standards of compliance for all European and public sector websites.
Another compliance factor is the compliance of the website code used behind the scenes to construct the site. We develop websites to comply with all current HTML and CSS compliance standards, and this has the additional benefit of assisting search engines to read your site.
Live Testing
While all of our work goes through the QA process, there is nothing more valuable than an initial period of live testing. This is because of the sheer volume of scenarios that could ever occur, trust me there are lots! Live testing is more a period of time than a “to do”, as it involves us watching very carefully for any odd behaviours or problems as they happen and fixing them there and then. A new website, if it is quite complex, will in our experience settle after 4-6 weeks, a simple website will take much less time. Generally it’s down to traffic – the more users on the site, the better idea we get of any issues.
Support Contracts
We recommend that all of our clients subscribe to a support contract with us, especially if we have developed the site, as we will spend much less time than another developer or hosting company looking into why a particular issue has occurred. We offer support contracts that are combined with our hosting services, although the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
