Each and every day, thousands of new websites come online around the world. The World Wide Web is a big place and as such, it is easy for your website to become lost in the search rankings of your chosen niche if you do not take the proper precautions when it comes to pinging for SEO and proper marketing. Before you have to stress over these elements, however, you have to deal with the construction and deployment of your website. Ensuring that all the right elements are in place and functioning as intended can be a stressful time in and of itself, but there is a way to simplify the evaluation of your endeavours. Below, we’ll talk about what you can do to streamline this process and how a few simple steps can go a long way in preparing your site for the public.

Gather Some Helpers

The number one element that is necessary in evaluating your site’s functionality and readiness is human beings impartial to its design. While you may be obsessed with seemingly unnoticeable criteria, your eyes may miss major omissions or design errors elsewhere. Whether you decide to go with a couple of friends or hired temporary hands, the need for an evaluation by others is critical to the site’s proper deployment. Once you have these individuals ready to evaluate your website, you can then move on to the actual process, which will require a few other elements. Having a set of unbiased people who will tell you what they think before you spend any marketing dollars or time promoting is a valuable element, and a key part of testing its functionality. If possible, hold several rounds of testing with different testers to get the most input possible.

Equipment

Ideally, you’ll want to have the people gather at the same time in order to have a focus group of sorts on the issues that may be pointed out. This means that you’ll need access to at least a couple of computers – you could do this testing at a library or similar public place with internet access if you do not have two or more computers available. Using tablets and mobile devices in this test is also a good idea, as more than one-third of your traffic is likely to come from mobile sources. If you haven’t configured your site to respond to mobile traffic optimally by displaying mobile versions, then your site is not ready to be launched yet. In addition to this, having a screen capture program that will record users’ actions and clicks can also be a great reference tool to examine which parts of your site may be more popular among users than others (think heat maps).

Outline Testing Goals

While evaluating all elements of your site – like its ease of use, capability of pinging for SEO and design – are important, you’ll need to streamline the testing in order to find focus on what needs to be done. By outlining the goals and objectives of the testing, you’ll keep participants focused on the parts of the site that matter most to its success. You may even want to break up your testing groups mentioned above into groups that assess a single element of the site, such as design or readability. Once you have a clear list of goals for the test, you’ll then be able to keep testers on track and will have a more manageable to-do list once the testing is complete.