By Jen Brister
Your company website is one of the most important aspects of your company's brand. If you have an effective, fast and easily accessible website, your sales will increase, and your client base will expand. If you find that your website is not quite up to par, you may wish to do a complete redesign. When you are redesigning your company website, there are several things that you need to do in order to make certain that it is ready to go live.
Website Redesign Checklist
- Check to make sure that the navigation is easy to use. Have several people who have never seen your new website have a look at it and try to navigate their way around. If they have no problem getting to where they want to go on your site, then your navigation is probably ready to use.
- Contact form. Run through the process of submitting a message through the contact form on your website. Check to make sure that the message gets through and time how long it takes for the company to receive the message.
- Discussion forums. If your website has discussion forums, have a few employees to start threads on the forums to make sure that they are working correctly. When you have an active forum on your website, your clients can exchange information and make your Web content much more interesting.
- Site speed. Have your Web developer test the site to see how fast it loads into the browser. If your site takes too long to load, many users will simply click away from it. It should load quickly and correctly.
- Graphics. Are the graphics easily viewed? Do they take too long to load? If so, they need to be redesigned. Have viewers of all ages look at the graphics to make sure that they can easily be seen and understood.
- Browsers. Check to make sure that your website loads correctly in all Web browsers. You should include Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, iPhone and any others that you can think of.
- Proofread. Hire a professional proofreader to look over your website. It is a huge mistake to let your site go live with grammar and spelling errors.
- Links. Have someone check each and every live link on your site to make sure that they are working correctly. This could make the difference in making a little bit of money from your site or making a substantial amount.
Before Your Web Site Goes Live
Before your site goes live, you need to make sure that you have all the information on how to access your website written down. There are plenty of business owners who have no idea how to access their own website. You should be able to access your website files and even make small changes such as adding new content. Make sure that you know how to do these things before your site goes live.
Have an attorney look over your legal policy for your website. If you are collecting user information such as email addresses, your site must have a legal policy page. Have your attorney look over it before it goes live to make sure that it includes everything that it must in order to be legal.
About the Author
Jen Brister has been a writer, researcher and Internet marketer for three years. She makes her living writing full time, publishing videos and creating websites.