How to Design a High Quality Website

Philosophe.com is a great resource for learning how to create a high quality web site. It teaches you quality assurance for web sites, including the important area of usability. Good web sites have four things in common: well designed, coded, filled with content, and thoroughly tested. This site shows you how to perform testing and QA on your web site, presenting it in a thoughtful and philosophic way. Though the material discussed and reviewed is aimed at larger sites, everything is also applicable to smaller sites such as individual home pages. You will learn the following about web site testing:

• the major concepts at the heart of the quality assurance process
• the critical importance of defining standards and specifications
• the general categories of tests you might want to perform on your web site
• some links to specialized QA web sites that might provide deeper information about any of the topics discussed here

• Site Design: Designing in Quality
• Requirements and Specifications
• Standards and Protocols
• Some General Comments on Style Guides
• Some Thoughts on Domain Names
• Common Sense Rules for Interaction Design
• Metaphors and Schemas in Design

• Getting To Know Your Audience
• Categorizing Your Audience
• Identifying Important Operating Systems
• Identifying Important Browsers
• A Sample User-Agent Log

• Some Basic Testing Concepts
• Building a Test Suite
• Types of Tests
• Understanding and Creating Testcases
• Testing Without a Formal Test Plan
• Outsourcing Web Site Testing

• Quality Control and Testing

• Basic Quality Assurance Concepts
• Understanding Quality
• Rating the Importance of Problems

• Introduction and Overview
• Online vs “Traditional” Commerce
• Schemas and Concept Mapping
• The Roles Within Commerce
• Branding and Merchant Identity
• Communicating With Users
• The Impression of Trustworthiness
• Other Commerce-Related Articles

• Considering Search: Search Topics
• Assumptions About Search
• Assumptions About User Search Behavior
• Types of Information Collections
• A Structural Look at Search
• Users and the Task of Information Retrieval
• Testing Search
• Useful Search Links and References

• Email and Messaging

• QA resources
• terms
• useful books
• links

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