When you are builiding a website, either completely new or a redo, do you go through Usability Testing with a professional?

One of my pet peeves is bad user experience, so I value testing. The smaller the website, the simpler it usually is (unless you have a lot of forms, surveys or shopping cart).

Do you find clients reluctant to pay for this?

@rich-brooks Clients want everything without added cost, LOL.  One reason I like it is that very often it helps to have a more objective 3rd party render an opinion. Sometimes the design team is too close–it’s their baby, after all.

Also, sometimes clients will insist on something, and I’ve seen developers deliver it because technically they could, but it wasn’t an intuitive feature.

Actually in a lot of cases it seems to happen in forms execution–just today I saw a form to resubscribe to a major publication that when ALL vislible fields on the screen were filled in, and you hit ‘submit’ the error message was that  “name must be filled in” although there was no field to include your name! That was not just lack of usability testing, but even simple UAT.