Web Design Best Practices Checklist

So many things and aspects have to be kept in mind while building a website. It often happens that in that mess we forget about some basic things like favicon or maybe about dummy content removal from test site. It’s much easier to go through all those things when you have all of them written down.

This article gives you bunch of different checklists, questionnaires and tips covering almost everything for an upcoming website. You probably will need just one of these tools, so choose carefully. Read some tips and decide which tool fits the best for your project planning and development process.

Client Checklists
1. How to Extract the Facts with a Web Design Client Questionnaire
This article will help you create a prospect qualification questionnaire that can be used via telephone or Internet or in face-to-face meetings.

2. Questions to Ask Clients Before Designing a Website
Reading some of these questions and following some guidelines will also save you and your client plenty of headaches throughout the process and pave the way to a lasting and trusting relationship.

3. 22 Questions to Ask Before Developing a Website
Detailed questionnaire that you can stick to to ease your work.

4. 72 Questions to Ask New Web Design Clients with PDF Chart
Huge list of the best 72 questions to ask prospective web design clients, along with a PDF chart.

5. Design Checklist: What Clients Should Provide Their Designer
This is a checklist of things that clients should provide their designer at the outset. To follow this list will ensure the client and designer are dealing professionally as well as creating an efficient workflow.

6. Comprehensive Web Design Checklist
The following checklist and the associated answers will facilitate the analysis process of designing and building the website that allows you to relate with the client better and understand what he needs.

7. 42 Questions Every Freelancer Should Ask Their Clients
This is a helpful list of 42 questions for freelancers to ask prospective clients during the interview/briefing process.

8. How To Create The Perfect Client Questionnaire
You won’t find a list of premaid questions in this article, but instead you are going to learn how to write your own questions, formula and refine them.

9. How to Create an Effective Web Design Questionnaire

This article is primarily about developing a one-way questionnaire where you aren’t there to explain or expound on the questions you’ve asked the respondent, though the same concepts apply whether you’re communicating via email or during a face-to-face meet.

10. Creative Latitude Client questionnaire
Find out what your client wants by asking the right questions. Download this helpful PDF questionnaire.

Prelaunch Chechklists

1. 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

2. 10 Things a Web Developer Should Do for The Client
Not exactly wrote as a checklist, but still useful list of things you should do before launching the website.

3. The Ultimate Website Prelaunch Checklist
Large and comprehensive list with checklists you should check before launching website.

4. Using a Pre-Launch Checklist for your Website
This pre-launch checklist entails a systematic approach to ensuring that important details are addressed before launching or relaunching a website.

5. W3C Unicorn – W3C’s Unified Validator

Ultimate W3C validator, which will check your markup, CSS validity, mobile-friendliness and syntax of Atom or RSS feeds.

Usability Checklists
1. Quick Usability Checklist
This post highlights some of the more common problems designers should address on their own sites in a usability checklist of sorts.

2. Some Typography Rules to Remember
PDF checklist of some typography do’s & don’ts which can be applied in web design.

3. 247 Web Usability Guidelines
Ultimate list of usability guidelines splitted into 9 sections.

4. 25-point Website Usability Checklist
This 25 point website usability checklist is a great way to create some method out of madness and make sure you don’t forget anything critical when working with a new client.

5. The Ultimate Web design Usability Checklist
This checklist with 88 questions is a must read for every web designer who cares about usability.

6. Sensible Forms: A Form Usability Checklist
Follow these guidelines, and you’ll be able to create beautiful, function able forms.

7. The Blog Usability Checklist
This is a 19 point checklist that should be useful to any blogger looking for a practical way to evaluate (and improve) the usability of their blog. Many of the principles here will apply to websites, as well.

8. The Essential Website Usability Checklist
This post is a simple 13-point usability checklist for webmasters. Ever good website must be able to answer ‘yes’ to each of these points.

9. Access Color
AccessColor tests the color contrast and color brightness between the foreground and background of all elements in the DOM to make sure that the contrast is high enough for people with visual impairments.

General Checklists

1. Web Design Best Practices Checklist
This is a sorted list that contains some of the most important aspects you should keep in mind when developing a website.

2. 50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website
This 50 questions long questionnaire might trigger something here and there for some of you or maybe brings some forgotten item from the long to-do list back into your mind.

3. Essential Navigation Checklists for Web Design

These checklists pull together best practice in the disciplines of information design, usability and accessibility, into an easy to apply format.

4. Aaron Cannon’s Web Accessibility Checklist
This checklist attempts to answer the question, ‘What concise pieces of advice can be given to designers that will have the greatest impact on accessibility in the majority of cases?’ Again, this list is not the perfect solution, nor is it the only solution, but it is a good first step, and it gives developers and designers a place to start from.

5. Beginner’s Checklist Before Debugging CSS
Most beginners make a common pattern of mistakes quite frequently. So if you are a beginner, this checklist will be just in time.

6. 10 Things You Must Check When You Re-launch Your Website
The following is a list of 10 things that you should check prior to and immediately after you have launched a new site.

7. Common Sense SEO Checklist
6 point beginner checklist that helps you to focus on what you do have control over and what improves your SEO rankings.

8. Web Design & Development Checklist
This questionnaire is for the front-end look and feel and does not address technical specifications. You may find that some of the questions are not applicable to a particular client or project.

9. SEO Checklist for Your New Website
The following 12 step optimization checklist will bring you one step closer to maximizing your revenues with smart web design.
Ultimate Checklists

1. Web Standards Checklist
This is a large checklist to help you build websites that match the web standards. However, this list should not be seen as a list of items that must be addressed on every site that you develop. It is simply a guide that can be used:

• to show the breadth of web standards
• as a handy tool for developers during the production phase of websites
• as an aid for developers who are interested in moving towards web standards

2. The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist
Very detailed checklist that covers both the pre-launch and the post-launch phase of the web site life cycle. It contains checks related to content and style, standards and validation, search engine visibility, functional testing, security/risk, performance and marketing.

3. 149 Mortal Sins That Will Send Your Site to Web Design Hell
Huge post with 2 checklists that will probably give you a preview of how a website should look.

4. Design Checklist

The following checklist serves to summarize the major points and to help you ensure you’ve done all you should before finalizing any web site you are creating.

5. The Official ‘Successful Website Checklist Challenge’
Complete guide from planning to SEo. Take this challenge and see what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what you’re forgetting to do. There are notes and resources included for nearly every item on the checklist.

6. 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site
Tackle these quick fixes over time, and you’ll be able to improve your website with minimal pain.

7. Launchlist
Launchlist is intended to help and encourage web designers and developers to check their work before exposing it to the world at large. The process is simple – enter your name and email and the same for a recipient, your project details and website URL, and then proceed through our list of provided fields.
So now you have read through the Web Design Best Practices Checklist, what are you going to do next? Hopefully you’ve written down your ideas, made lots of notes and started to form a strategic plan.

Now comes the challenging part. Now it’s time for you to take action.

Helping You Take Action

At VIS we show clients how to build a Results- Driven Online Solutions. Here the client discovers how to clearly identify and define everything that they want to focus on over the next quarter. Online Business, and especially the area of marketing, is far too dynamic not to have an action plan. A proactive business must be anticipating changes. They must plan and review their progress constantly.
If so just feel free to Contact VIS at 08-8338-3846 . We are just a call away from you.