StoresOnline Day 62: Make Sure you Test your Pages Thoroughly

Having worked with html pages for a few years, I know better than anybody the importance of testing the pages. However, I discovered that doesn’t mean I can’t be as careless as anybody.

I finished my homepage some time ago and checked it on IE and Firefox. It looked fine:

But then I got a blog comment from someone who said the page breaks. It looks like this:

It turns out that if the window is maximized, it looks fine. But once you resize the window so that it is not full size, it breaks.

So, the moral is to make sure you do some basic checking of your site, even if you think everything is fine.

• Check your site using Internet Explorer. Don’t just use the latest and greatest version. Try to check it using the version that most people have. Here’s a great resource for seeing what version the majority of people are using: Browser Version Stats.
• Also test your site using Firefox.
• If you want to test using Opera and Netscape, better. (I admit I’ll probably only do this if the stats show that a lot of people use these browsers).
• If you also want to test using Firefox and Safari on a Mac, even better (IE on a Mac is no longer supported).
• Make sure you click through all pages on your published site, both using a maximized browser window and a partially closed window.
• Make sure you put in a test order all the way through (create a test product for .01 and create an ordering rule that says if you buy the test product, shipping is free. Publish, test, then make sure you delete this test product and ordering rule as soon as your test is done. Note that I left my test ordering rule there because I figured that if I didn’t purchase the test product, the rule wouldn’t be used. But the test product shipping rule messed up my live product rule, so better to be safe and delete it).
• If you offer more than one payment method, test all of them. I noticed one person’s store was giving an error every time I tried to purchase with Paypal because there was something wrong in her Paypal account. She was losing a sale every time someone wanted to pay with Paypal and didn’t know it.
  
  For non Paypal payments, you can use the universal test credit card for Visa: 4111111111111111. This should go through as if it were a live card, but the charge will never be applied. Or you can just purchase your .01 item. Note that for Paypal, 4111 does not work; you must purchase your .01 item to test it.
• Make sure you send yourself a contact us email. I had someone mention that when she tried to send a contact us email, she got an error that she had to select a first-choice fabric. This is because I had put in a rule for a product order, not realizing this rule would also affect the contact us page.

I know it’s a lot of work to do all this testing (which is why I didn’t do it!) But you really don’t want to lose a single sale because your site breaks for someone. So test, test, test.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | 2 Comments »