Quality Assurance

An essential part of any serious website is a maintenance plan. This can be tedious, and is often neglected. Yet without it, your site will become outdated, your users will see it as unreliable, and will become reluctant to use it. If one address proves to be out of date, people may prefer to phone you rather than trust the other 99!

The online Site Valet Quality Assurance programme is designed to support the maintenance of a website, by offering instant page- and site-reports, and alerting you whenever something needs to be done.

Finally, it offers a structured framework for any visitor to your site to offer feedback, and for you to track and deal with issues raised by your users.

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The Mark of Quality

[Mark of Quality] Advertise your Quality!

A Site Valet badge on your pages represents a public commitment to quality. Like the W3C "Valid" badges, it enables your visitors as well as you to click through to a report on your site and page. However, the Site Valet report is altogether more comprehensive than the W3C reports, and demonstrates your total commitment to quality.


Maintenance: stay on top of the task

The Site Valet QA programme includes the option to receive regular email reports detailing any maintenance required on your site. You have a choice of report formats, and you can also specify in detail whether all reports are sent to a single webmaster address or to individual page maintainers.

Page Checks

It is all too easy for errors to creep into your pages. This may lead to problems you cannot predict (more). Site Valet will alert you to errors in your pages. Whilst this online service will only report pages that fail validation, this can easily be extended to enforce your company standard.

Page Updates

A few pages can be written once and then left alone. Others need to be updated every day, and are explicitly someone's responsibility to deal with. But many websites and the majority of pages fall somewhere between these two extremes. They may need to be periodically updated, or they may be basically static but require periodic review. Such pages are in danger of simply being overlooked.

Site Valet supports periodic maintenance by checking the Expires HTTP header or equivalent META element in your pages, and mailing you a reminder when they are due for review.

Link Maintenance

Site Valet will of course report to you whenever a page you have linked to is moved or deleted. But it will also report when the contents of a page you link to changes, so you can check whether your links are still appropriate.