Designer Launch Q/A

Before your site goes live on the WineDirect platform, we perform a Quality Assurance check to ensure that everything is running smoothly and that there aren't things that will prevent a customer from purchasing wine based on what we consider best practice.

1. Is the website page load less than 1 megabyte?

The longer it takes to load a page, the more likely a user is going to leave. On average, after three seconds, up to 40% of users will give up and leave.  Try minifying your CSS and JavaScript, and compressing your images so that the page load is as light as possible.

2. Are there any 404 or JavaScript errors in the console?

Check your console for errors; these can make your website slow or not react as expected.  If there are errors listed, some common problems include broken images or issues with Javascript plugins. 

3. Are there multiple instances of jQuery being brought in?

This is the most common reason why the default WineDirect JavaScript won't work properly. The WineDirect quicklaunch tag adds jQuery 1.7.2 to your layout. Multiple jQuery instances tend to cause JavaScript errors that may prevent a customer from being able to purchase from the site.

4. Are there any major issues at different breakpoints?

Your site should look great regardless if your user is on an iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Nexus, or any other range of devices. If there are certain screen sizes where your site doesn't work properly, you may be losing a sale because the user is having a bad experience moving around your website. Test this by opening your site in a browser and dragging the end of the window right in; all of the way down to mobile sized screens. Make sure that you give customers the best experience possible, no matter which device size they are visiting from. 

5. Are the user tools available throughout the entire site?

To maintain a standard flow, we consider it best practice to have the user and cart tools available throughout the entire site so the customer will always know where to access their account information and see what items are in their cart. We want to keep the site unified so there is never a question on how to get to the cart. Take a look at some of the major retailers. Amazon, Zappos, Walmart, and Target all have the user tools accessible throughout the entire site. 

6. Do the user tools work properly if your site is responsive?

If your site works on tablet and mobile, please make sure that the cart and user tools do too.

7. Does the site use our v65:layoutHeaderNav tag?

We strongly recommend the use of our designer launch tags as they are meant for you to empower the client to manage their website without a designer needing to step in in the future.

8. Are SSL pages secure?

Are there absolute paths to non-https elements being called in? Common culprits are external scripts, embedded fonts, and background images. Make sure your assets are using relative paths, or that your fonts are embedded using '//fonts.googleapis.com' instead of 'http://fonts.googleapis.com'. 

9. Do the call-to-action buttons have a stronger presence than the alternate buttons?

We want consumers to proceed to checkout, so as a designer we should try and help encourage that. Primary actions buttons are the ones that get the customer to checkout; these should be the most prominent on the page. (View Cart, Checkout vs Keep Shopping and Close)

10. The print receipt should be plain. It should have the company logo at the top, their receipt details, and the company details at the bottom.

While we as designers know that background styling gets reset to white when you try and print a page, the average user will think, that all of the page colors will get printed. Help put their mind at ease and let them see the print receipt the same way they will when they go to print.

11. There should be no WineDirect Designer Launch tags on the error page.

This should be static HTML. It is used when there is a hard system error, which means that it can't contain any designer launch tags.

12. The member area should have sub-navigation.

Without sub navigation being present on the member pages, there will be no way for a user to access their order history, update their credit cards, or see what the current allocation releases are.

13. Does the site work in Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer (IE8 to current)?

A large amount of users are still using IE8, so please test to see that they still have a site that is functional. Don’t forget that HTML5 shiv.

Some useful resources and information

If you're wondering where we got some of these stats or are looking for useful tools, you can find them all below.

• A List Apart - Improving UX Through Front-End Performance
• Google - Make the web Faster
• Tiny PNG - Shrink PNG files
• Online JavaScript/CSS Compression
• Mobify - 13 stats to convince your boss to invest in mobile
• Mobify - 50 Mobile Commerce Stats
• Localytics - 20 Fresh Mobile Trends