“Testing and Delivery”

Key Stages of a Web Pro­ject :5

Before The Devel­op­ment Stage can be fully
signed off and the web­site is allowed to go live,
there comes a “Test­ing and Deliv­ery” stage.
Vari­ous checks are car­ried out to ensure that
everything is work­ing as it should.

Work­ing Functionality

This is always pretty easy to spot and rem­edy, do forms all work cor­rectly and go to the cor­rect email address? Does a ‘Thank you” page appear when a vis­itor has clicked some­thing? Any­thing like this is pure web devel­op­ment mech­an­ics and is always a clear cut case of imple­ment­ing a fix and test­ing until sat­is­fied. Issues like these are put right quickly, they are the equi­val­ent to ‘snag­ging’ when buy­ing a new house.

Com­pli­ance and Standards

Twenty­four­ten check their sites through the W3Cs Val­id­a­tion ser­vices for Markup and CSS com­pli­ance. What we are look­ing for here is a use­ful method of let­ting an auto­mated ser­vice flag any of issues with code which we can then decide if and how best to address.

Browser Com­pat­ib­il­ity

The bane of a Web Developers life! Unfor­tu­nately, not all browsers render (dis­play) HTML and CSS in the same way. This means to achieve the ‘look and feel’ that was estab­lished back in “The Design Stage” of the web pro­ject pro­cess, we spend an awful lot of time cod­ing to get a com­mon inter­pret­a­tion of how a web­site should appear across dif­fer­ent browsers, often writ­ing browser spe­cific code to force the issue.

Twenty­four­ten check how web­sites render across most mod­ern browsers, over both PC and Mac plat­forms and check back­wards com­pli­ance back to IE7.

Let’s go live!

Once the devel­op­ment ver­sion of the web­site has been OK’d by the cli­ent, we can now upload the web­site files to a cli­ents server/hosting space and the com­pleted web­site will be serving out under the chosen URL.

As well as a copy of the files on the server, cli­ents may have a copy on CD along with all the work­ing files used to con­struct their site.

The Next Key Stage

Some­times com­pleted web­site pro­jects are main­tained by a cli­ents in-house ‘web or IT team’, but mostly our cli­ents con­tinue the rela­tion­ship with Twenty­four­ten and we main­tain and develop their web­sites fur­ther. Let’s look in detail at that next Key Stage …