Before your site goes live on the Vin65 platform, we perform a Quality Assurance check to make sure that everything is running smooth and that there aren't things that will prevent a customer from purchasing wine based on what we consider to be best practice.
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The longer it takes to load a page, the more likely a user is going to leave. On average, after three seconds, up to 40% of users will give up and leave. Try minifying your CSS and JavaScript, and compressing your images so that the page load is as light as possible.
Check your console for errors; these can make your website slow or not react as expected. If there are errors listed, some common problems include broken images or issues with Javascript plugins.
This is the most common reason why the default Vin65 JavaScript won't work properly. The Vin65 quicklaunch tag adds jQuery 1.7.2 to your layout. Multiple jQuery instances tend to cause JavaScript errors that may prevent a customer from being able to purchase from the site.
Your site should look great regardless if your user is on an iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Nexus, or any other range of devices. If there are certain screen sizes where your site doesn't work properly, you may be losing a sale because the user is having a bad experience moving around your website. Test this by opening your site in a browser and dragging the end of the window right in; all of the way down to mobile sized screens. Make sure that you give customers the best experience possible, no matter which device size they are visiting from.
To maintain a standard flow, we consider it best practice to have the user and cart tools available throughout the entire site so the customer will always know where to access their account information and see what items are in their cart. We want to keep the site unified so there is never a question on how to get to the cart. Take a look at some of the major retailers. Amazon, Zappos, Walmart, and Target all have the user tools accessible throughout the entire site.
If your site works on tablet and mobile, please make sure that the cart and user tools do too.
We strongly recommend the use of our designer launch tags as they are meant for you to empower the client to manage their website without a designer needing to step in in the future.
Are there absolute paths to non-https elements being called in? Common culprits are external scripts, embedded fonts, and background images. Make sure your assets are using relative paths, or that your fonts are embedded using '//fonts.googleapis.com' instead of 'http://fonts.googleapis.com'.
We want consumers to proceed to checkout, so as a designer we should try and help encourage that. Primary actions buttons are the ones that get the customer to checkout; these should be the most prominent on the page. (View Cart, Checkout vs Keep Shopping and Close)
While we as designers know that background styling gets reset to white when you try and print a page, the average user will think, that all of the page colors will get printed. Help put their mind at ease and let them see the print receipt the same way they will when they go to print.
This should be static HTML. It is used when there is a hard system error, which means that it can't contain any designer launch tags.
Without sub navigation being present on the member pages, there will be no way for a user to access their order history, update their credit cards, or see what the current allocation releases are.
A large amount of users are still using IE8, so please test to see that they still have a site that is functional. Don’t forget that HTML5 shiv.
In case you're wondering where we got some of these stats or are looking for some useful tools, you'll be able to find them all below.