What’s the worst thing when you launch a new website? Things go wrong. You don’t want your customers to see glitches, errors, or pages loading slowly. You want them to have a trouble-free experience from start to finish—from the high-quality imagery on each page to the easy functionality of the site itself.
Hiring expert web developers like us are expensive. Are we talking thousands of dollars and then paying them to fix a botched launch later? No! To help you overcome some of the problems in launching your website, here are five essential steps Stoute Web Solutions take when launching new sites.
Content
We all know that a website is not ready for launching unless it contains all information and contents. But, few people know that Stoute Web Solutions checks the site’s contents before launching a website. What are we checking? We are checking if there are any grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes, sentence structure, or punctuation and if there is anything that is breaking the law.
We understand that by content, you let your audience read about your company. It can be a perfect opportunity for you to grab your audience’s attention because they are reading about you for the first time. This is why it is essential to make an impression of professionalism by checking every piece of content to ensure it’s error-free and reader-friendly.
It is beneficial to check content because letting your readers read your content will help them understand what your company does and how it benefits them. If this is done correctly, people will know what you do for them and trust you more.
If the contents are error-free or reader-friendly, this can create a terrible image of your company in front of your audience. This can also spoil their trust in you, so they may start avoiding you.
Readability
Readability is an essential factor you should consider when writing your website content. It would be better if your message were easy to understand and engaging for the reader. It will help your site visitors to stay longer on your website and make more sense of what you are offering.
Hemingway tool is good for blog authors, copywriters, and content marketers who want to write better, more readable blog posts. The tool quickly scans your text and highlights the grammatical errors and sentences with hard-to-read characteristics. It also gives suggestions on improving your writing by optimizing your sentences—adding words, splitting phrases into smaller sentences, or rearranging words.
We have used this tool to check out the readability of our website before launching every website for our clients. We have used this tool to see whether we can enhance our website content further by removing complexity in sentences or breaking them down into smaller ones for a better reader experience.
Images
At Stoute Web Solutions, we know the importance of a website’s images, videos, and animated SVG. Suppose a website is built with poor-quality images, videos, and SVGs. In that case, it can have a negative impact on the user experience of the website.
We ensure that your images are well-lit, high-resolution, and suitably cropped to avoid clutter. We also ran them through image editing software before you uploaded them to your website.
Many different factors go into an image quality test. By ensuring that each of these factors is seen, we can guarantee the ultimate readability and user experience. We always ensure that the images are high resolution and crisp—no fuzzy edges or low resolution for us! We also ensure that our images load as quickly as possible—even if they aren’t visible to the user, we still want them to download at lightning speed.
Responsiveness
Responsive web design is the best way to ensure your site looks great on whatever device your users are looking at it. It’s a relatively new phenomenon and one that most people haven’t heard of. Most people are familiar with ‘responsive’ websites, but few know what it means for a site to be ‘responsive.’
It’s become an integral part of our process and has been the key to building quality sites for our clients. The whole concept behind responsive web design is easy to understand but can be hard to implement in practice. Responsive web design ensures that your website is a joy to use regardless of your device. It takes into account the variety of screen resolutions on the market. It ensures that your site looks good on every device.
Browsing the web on smartphones was once seen as a convenience feature, but now it’s become essential for everyone. People want their information quickly, wherever they are, and on whatever device they use. The responsive design seems like a no-brainer when you consider how many different devices there are, ranging from smartphones, pads, and tablets to desktops and laptops. Having a website that doesn’t look good is bad enough, but having one that doesn’t work correctly is even worse.
Links
Checking links is a crucial step in creating a functional website. This is because links are what make your website interactive. It is what makes your website live and breathe. Without it, you will have a static, boring website that nobody would want to visit.
An example of an error that could be found during this step is having broken links on the page. A broken link can be easily tested by simply clicking on it and ensuring it takes you to the correct site. If the link doesn’t work, it’s broken and needs to be updated or fixed before going live.
To ensure your pages don’t have any errors when they go live, it’s best to test them more than once, as there may still be errors if these steps are not followed properly.
If not, visitors to your site will be annoyed and frustrated and won’t want to return. It’s also just good business practice. You might think that it’s not your problem whether or not the links on your site are broken; sites are made by web designers, after all, so if something goes wrong, it’s their responsibility, right? Wrong. The client signs off on a website before it goes live and is responsible for its success or failure.
Try it out for yourself!
If you are thinking about redesigning your existing website and if you have a new website you want to launch and apply this pre-launch checklist, don’t hesitate to contact Stoute Web Solutions. Enjoy the smooth launch of your new website!
