Check every link, form and outside service

This redesign looks finished. But a page can look perfect and still send people nowhere. So before anyone sees it, test what it connects to: every link, every form and every outside service, on the review address. And write each result down.

Start with the links. This script reads the page, finds every address on it, asks each one for its answer, and follows any redirects. Twenty-three links. Six jump to a section of the same page, and each section is there. The other seventeen all answer two hundred, which means OK. But a two hundred isn't proof. A video page answers two hundred even when the video doesn't exist. Here's a made-up address: two hundred. So ask the video service itself. All nine talks are there, and the made-up one is refused.

Some links can't be real yet. This is a speculative redesign I made for AllWeb, so the ticket buttons can't sell tickets. Each one says so when you point at it: demo only, not a live link. Nineteen of them, each one labeled. That's honest. A button that quietly goes nowhere isn't.

The page has one form: a sign-up for the program. It's a prototype, and it says so. Send a test address, and it answers: nothing was sent. The check agrees: no request left the page. A prototype can't show you an inbox. So the rest of the form check runs on the practice bakery's order form, on its review build. Send it four ways. Empty: it lists three things to fix. A wrong email: it says what's missing. Offline: not sent, and the details are still there. Right: received. Then open the inbox. One order, from the right test.

Last, outside services: videos, maps, booking, chat, analytics. Each one is another company your page talks to. Open the page in a fresh browser, scroll to the end, and list every address it calls. Here, eighty-two requests, all to the site's own address. No cookies, nothing stored. But one of those requests is a script: the host's visitor count, served from the site's own address. It's still an outside service, so it goes in the record. The talks and the map are plain links, so nothing loads from anyone else until a visitor clicks. For each service, write down what it is, and whether it runs before anyone agrees.

Now write it into the QA record: what you checked, how, and what it found. Links, videos, demo links, each form and outside services, one line each. The pre-send gate can then point at this record instead of at your memory.

Ask every link, send every form, and list every outside call before you send.