It used to be that when you wanted to do some marketing, you’d come up with a plan, nail down some messaging, develop collateral, and BAM! Marketing. But in today’s digital landscape, what you do and how well you do it are critical to the success of your campaign. Quite often, in the digital space, you only have one chance to impress your customers, so you can’t afford to waste time with malfunctioning links, difficult navigation, and error messages.

If people become frustrated, your competition is just one click away, so how do you make sure your customers are having an awesomesauce experience when using your website or Facebook app for example?

Quality assurance used to be pretty straightforward—proof the copy, confirm there aren’t any visible problems and you’re done. But today there are quite a few things that can go wrong with a digital project that might not be immediately apparent.

So, it all comes down to having a solid quality assurance protocol.

Problems can easily arise when there are many different agencies and people working on a single technical orchestration. GLAD WORKS is kind of special because we do everything from soup to nuts in-house. Not all places are like us. Some places only do web development; some focus on design and others are simply marketing companies. Our clients are spoiled because we have the entire process under control in one place—from strategy and design to web development.

What’s great about that is that we have an Account Manager who oversees every detail of our projects. She’s there making sure the whole team is rowing in the same direction. Additionally, everyone who works on a project here tests the functionality and actually tries to break it. In our protocol, we check and cross check everything for one another. We go through hundreds of permutations, trying to find defects before things go live.

But what happens when you don’t have a single team, but many different teams? It’s very easy to miss things when there are so many different people working on a project, so it’s important to have a quality assurance system in place.

That system should be you (and your mom, your best friend, your uncle Eddie, etc. The more eyes, the better.).

Now, the things that need checking depend on the project, so that’s going to vary, but there’s a bunch of different things that you can test to make sure everything is perfect before the launch. It might all look good to you, but is it is working properly?

• Review the functionality and content carefully
• Check for correct grammar and spelling
• Check all variable text and graphics for placement and accuracy
• Make sure nothing was left out
• If the project is mobile friendly, does it work correctly on different mobile devices?
• Test your project on different browsers. Do the scripts work and do different browsers render the page correctly?
• Do all the links work?
• Does your shopping cart work as it should?
• Check your interactive forms to make sure they function well both externally for your user, and internally so that you receive the correct information from your form submissions.

These are all things that don’t require a large amount of technical expertise, but taking a few moments to go over everything from a user’s perspective can save you from a potentially embarrassing flaw and lost business.

Even if you ARE working with us, you should still go through and be your own quality assurance person. After all, this is your project and your chance to make an impression on your customers. It needs to be perfect, and you need to love it.