Do It Right with Best Practices

Abstract

You’re excited; your client is excited. All is well. You’ve just launched the client’s latest website, and it’s fantastic. You’ve put in hours of sweat and tears, tweaking every little detail of the design—expanding menus, interactive Ajax, all the latest bells and whistles. It looks good, works perfectly, and everyone’s partying. But a week later disaster begins. The client phones in a panic; it seems they’ve been getting calls from some customers who can’t get past the home page, and others are having problems with some aspects of the feedback form—but it works fine for you and the client. Other people have been calling and complaining that the site is taking too long to download each page, even though it doesn’t look like there’s much on the page, and you barely notice the load time. To top it off, the client has found that its search engine ranking has plummeted from number one to nowhere. Things are not good after all. But where could you have gone wrong? Let’s find out.