Testing is an essential part of the web design and development process but it can be easily neglected or approached in the wrong way. Most will spend a lot of time checking out the progress and functionality of their website during development: looking for consistency across the various pages, seeing if the navigation is practical and works well, testing it on many different browsers, checking the quality of the images, scanning for typos and editing the written content. With all of these plates to keep spinning it can be difficult to also factor in the most important aspect of web design - who will be looking at it? 

Do you know your audience and the kind of websites they have come to expect from your industry? You need to define clearly what you want users to do when they are on the website. If you want them to buy products, point them in the direction of your catalogue page and make the shopping cart process easy and logical. If you're using the website to generate leads and enquiries, make sure your contact details are prominent on every page of the website. 

The best way to ensure that your website is getting the right response from users is to test it as much as you can. You can do this at any or all stages of development and use their feedback to make the website more effective. Here's a breakdown of the advantages to receiving feedback at various parts of the web design process:

Before production: You can speak to people in your target niche or audience and figure out the websites that they like and visit regularly and why, and also the websites that they dislike. Speaking to users at an early stage can help point you in the right direction with the development of your website but has the disadvantage that at this stage you won't have produced something concrete for them to test and give feedback on.

During production: It's very important to have users test the website at this point. The project is still in progress so they can pick up on problems with the layout, functionality or other basic things about the website. You can then report back to your designers and have them make the appropriate changes before anything has been finalised. The downside to this of course that the users could spot something extremely significant that needs to be changed and delay the completion of the project. The alterations will ultimately be worth but bear the time constraints in mind with this method of testing.

After production: Having the website tested by users after the launch is also crucial. You need to know that everything is working as you intended; the navigation is accessible, the message is clear, the images are loading in the right place at the right size and so on. Testing at this stage only however means a critical error could be spotted, something that needs a lot of work. The project may have been finalised so you'd have to go back to your developers and pay for alterations.

You can clearly see the benefits to having your website tested consistently throughout the web design and development process. Take advantage of the feedback you receive from your users and get your website working for you from the moment it launches.