Quality Assurance Tools

Quality assurance, or QA, is the detailed-oriented, structured process of ensuring that everything about a web environment—from its front-end to its back-end—is firing on all cylinders before it goes live. A majority of QA will occur during the testing phase of a web project. However, the beginnings of QA can be traced back to the early phases of a project, even as far back as revisiting the branding guidelines and web style guide to make sure they're up-to-date and available to the team at the start. And taking the time to draft the project specifications (particularly useful for vendors) and document the content requirements up front will help to make sure everyone's on the same page, leading to a better, consistent, and higher quality website down the road.

Other important tools that play an early role in QA include project summary worksheets (which document a project's background information and are very useful in getting team member's up-to-speed), content inventory spreadsheets, and content matrices. A content inventory spreadsheet is a record of the current content on a site, while a content matrix takes that a step further. A content matrix maps all of the content for a website, both current and planned; it can be used to track URLs, content objects, content status, content type, reviewers, authors, deadlines—basically, it acts as a central repository for all things content.

During the testing phase of a web project, checklists are an important QA tool to validate the front and back-end of the site before launch. Click every link, review every webpage, hit play on every video, if possible. In the CMS, open every content module, delete unused material, verify that everything in the back-end is displaying on the front-end. This type of meticulous attention to detail will pay off on the launch date when the first visitors step aboard.

Umbraco Level 1 Training Oct. 19-20

Umbraco Level 1 training is being offered in Seattle on Oct. 19-20! Paul Sterling, an Umbraco MVP, is teaching the course over the two-day span.

Umbraco Training - Level 1
October 19-20, 2009
Seattle Public Library
1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104
Register Here

Several different web developers recommended this course to me. One said, "You'll end up knowing much more about Umbraco and increase your ability to direct projects and understand when Umbraco would make a great solution to a challenge." While the course's target audience is designers and web developers, it seems to be doable (and enjoyable) for those of us who only moonlight as developers once in a blue moon or wish we could.

vjoon K4 Publishing System

What is K4? I heard about this publishing system recently and wanted to learn more. K4 is produced by vjoon, a company based in Germany that creates publishing solutions. This system is primarily for publishing content for magazines, newspapers, business reports, and books, both on and off-line. While K4 appears to be a solution targeted at major media companies (and is too big for the smaller company I work for), it has piqued my curiosity. Read more about it at www.vjoon.com. Have you used K4 before? Let me know your thoughts!

Leveraging Content Pt. 1

So what does it mean to "leverage"? In short, it means to create something once and then reuse it elsewhere. A pretty simple but valuable concept. In the financial industry, the word "leverage" means: "The use of a small initial investment...to gain a very high return in relation to one's investment" (Dictionary.com). Note the phrase "a very high return." Ideally, that's the goal of well-leveraged content--you invest once in its creation to see a return on that investment grow as the content is reused.

Thinking about this reminds me of a conference call with a gentleman in the online courseware industry several months back. He too was very familiar with the concept of leveraging content and knew the significance of its potential ROI. He spoke unabashedly about creating a course once and then reselling it to a broad spectrum of customers. He could switch out one color scheme and company logo for a different one, and bam, he'd have a branded course ready to go for the next customer. In every case, his initial investment was blown out of the water by the amount he made back. (Before we go leaping from our seats to enter the online courseware industry, it is important to note that he also had several elements in his favor--in almost all cases, he was his own subject matter expert, course designer, and content creator, reducing his overhead, and he focused on soft skill learning.) His enthusiasm for his courses was infectious and serves as a good example of an individual successfully leveraging content.

Umbraco - Open Source CMS

Umbraco is an open source content management system (CMS) from Denmark. I've been working with it professionally for more than two years to manage some 15 websites and white labels. The key to getting it to work for you is to assemble a good team of knowledgeable people to develop, manage, and use the CMS. The ideal team should include a developer and a content manager at minimum who share and understand a vision of how it will be used. In my case, our team included, depending on the situation: two developers, a content manager (me), an outside web design company (sometimes), and a technical illustrator. Check this CMS out at http://umbraco.org/. Have you used Umbraco before? If so, I'd love to hear the pros and cons of your experience.