QA website - Techniques and best practices

QA is a critical comp

Technorati Tags: quality check , quality , contol , assurance

onent of a web design process and one of the disadvantage of using a small company is that they do not follow the QA process. There are various tools and white papers for doing QA on the Internet. However, the recommended processes take a long time and usually a small company like mine is always short of time and it is tough to introduce a QA process as it takes time to download the process and practice. After a lot of research I concluded that it is best that I define my process for QA of web pages which does not take time and is easy to implement. I studied a lot of processes which others have shared on the Internet.

The process is divided into five phases and they are

1. Self review
2. Peer review
3. Content approval
4. Testing and usability.
5. Compliance of set practices and
6. Determine maintenance cycle

The need to describe the processes is there specially if you want to download them to your team.

Self Review

The best way to do a self review is first print the pages that have been built including the format and images and then check that

1. Free from spelling and grammatical errors
2. Be concise: avoid long sentences and paragraphs
3. As far as possible the content in a website should be written in plain English using the active voice.
4. The format of the content of the website should be optimized for the screen so that it can be easily read. A website should have meaningful headings, bulleted lists and short paragraphs.
5. The written style should be such that it does not sound promotional and should not criticize or praise any existing websites.
6. When doing a self review the meta tag information should be checked for spelling and appropriate content. This includes
1. An appropriate page title.
2. A short description/summary of the content.
3. A set of keywords that identify the content. Think about the type of words that people might type into a search engine to find your content.
7. Images should be:
1. Cropped and/or resized to suit the purpose
2. Optimised and saved in a format appropriate for use on the web.
8. Where multimedia formats are used, ensure:
1. Transcripts are available for audio content
2. Video is captioned (or transcribed)
9. Where PDF format is used, ensure:
1. An RTF alternative is provided, or
2. A way of contacting someone to obtain an accessible alternative

I will follow up this post with others which would have the complete process for Quality Assurance of a website. In the next post I will tell the process that I follow for doing a peer review.

Please share your suggestions if you have any as sharing knowledge is one the principle goal of this blog.