10 Things to Care about in Your Website Testing

These are ten points I think are good to check when you do some testing for your website. Actually I write them down with no extreme thinking and in five minutes, so if you want to add some points or you believe some of them are senseless just leave a comment! ;)

(Illustration by DGBurns)

Checklist to test websites:

1- Check that screen resolution is set to a "standard" one. Delete cookies, history and refresh the page.
2- Test each single task on different web browsers and resolutions.
3- Turn back to the home page after each task. This provides a common baseline to test multiple users.
4- Check the task using different roles (user types) and users.
5- Take your time while testing the task.
6- Do the test and take notes. These will help you in site improvement + finding new bugs.
7- Ask others and involve your team, in case you have doubts.
8- Use websites like http://browsershots.org/ to test multiple browsers + resolutions.
9- Disable Javascript / JAVA, enable default CSS and see the changes.
10- Be sure of the level of W3C compliance (you can check it at: http://validator.w3.org)

Checklist specific to design:

1- Be sure that all the paragraph texts + headers are all of the same size, font face and color.
2- Text, images and other element are well-aligned.
3- Sections (and content) stay at the same size / width for different pages.
4- Links' hover is styled correctly through the site.
5- Run a CSS validation test (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator)
6- Check for broken background images.
7- Check if specific design needed (like rounded corners, sliding doors, equal-height design) is really there and well implemented.
8- For RTL/LTR websites check the design styles are correct.
9- Try to use standard CSS (no browser-specific hacks, no absolute positioning, no tables for layout, no Javascript for styling).
10- If you have a PSD (or raster image) design of the website, try to position your current website above it and check the differences.