This is third post in the series on website design process. Here’s are quick links to first and second parts:
- Part I: WordPress Installation Checklist
- Part II: Checklist To Move The Development Site To The Production Server
Migrating the website to client’s server and finally making it live is the last and the most critical step in the life cycle of delivering a website. You have to go through entire email thread and conversation you have had with the clients, go through the project deliverables to make sure nothing is missed from the list… cross-browser testing, W3C validation, responsive design testing and the list goes on. Just to make sure I don’t miss on any point, I have created a website development process pre-delivery checklist that comes in handy at almost all the occasions.
Website Pre-Delivery Checklist
- Go through the entire conversation with the client and see if all the requirements and stated functionality is implemented.
- Verify all the templates — Home, Page, Single, Archives, 404, Search template and any other template to ensure that all are designed as per the requirement. Refer https://developer.wordpress.org/files/2014/10/template-hierarchy.png
- Verify responsive design implementation.
- Verify that the design doesn’t break because of image — if the design is dependent on images, make provision for default image.
- Make sure that the website has a favicon.
- When using web-fonts, test on other system to ensure that the fonts have been loaded properly. [Multiple google fonts should be included in one script only].
- Check the links — there should be no dead or invalid links — W3C Link Checker.
- Test the SEO settings — Slugs, alt text for images, robots.txt, no-follow, no-index, etc.
- Thoroughly check the code files. Code should be well commented and adhere to WordPress coding standards, best-practices and WordPress code / beautifier format.
- W3C Validation.
- Verify whether all the contact forms are working fine.
- If using jquery, ensure that there are no jQuery conflicts. A quick F12, if you are using Firefox and Firebug will act as a savior.
- Cross browser testing to make sure design looks and behaves well across the browsers.
- Test responsive design on various tools — responsinator and designmodo responsive tool, etc and on the smartphone also.
Please share your website pre-delivery checklist in the comments. And feel free to add if anything is missing from the list.
