You new website pre-launch checklist
When launching a new web page or blog, the design itself is only half the work. There’s also a lot of I’s to dot and T’s to cross when it comes to things like search engine optimization, traffic analysis and points of contact.
None of these factors have any effect on the appearance of your site and can be overlooked, here I’ve compiled a list of forget me nots for your next ( or recent ) web page or blog.
Search engine optimization
At a minimum you should need the basic SEO of title, description and keywords. e.g.
- Title : Andrew Keir – Logo designer, web designer, graphic designer.
- Description: Graphic designer from Sydney, Australia…
- Keywords: logo design, graphic design, web design etc…
You should also have a sitemap. A sitemap is a list of your entire sites content, this list is read by search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. and ensures all your content is promptly discovered.
There are 2 plug-ins, All in One SEO and Google XML sitemap which manage both these for you if your running a Wordpress blog. You can read more about these and other useful plugins here.
Check your contact and form details
This ones pretty straight forward, check your email address and any mailto: links are correct and also any contact or submission forms are working.
I’m sure you’d hate to find 3 months down the track that your point of contact isn’t working.
Create a Favicon
A Favicon is the image that shows next to your web page address in internet browsers and also when your web page is bookmarked and adds to your branding.
On my page for example you can see I use a lowercase a in 1 of my corporate colours and typeface of my logo, Futura LT Medium Bold.
RSS and email subscriptions
Another blog only step, this is much the same as checking your email and contact forms, subscribe to both to ensure they are working. Also be sure to have a RSS icon, this is the standard symbol your readers will look for when subscribing to your site.
You could use either the standard orange RSS symbol, the feedburner count icon or there are a tonne of custom icons available if you search Google.
Check multiple browser compatibility
With the dozens of browsers out there what you see isn’t necessarily the same as the next person. At a minimum you probably want to check Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. These are the standard most common Windows, Mac and third party browsers.
There are more, Camino, Chrome, Opera etc. and each browser has a up to a dozen versions. Obviously your not going to be able to test every single possible browser but be sure to test a few.
W3C validation
The W3C Markup Validation webpage is a free service that checks the markup language of your web page for any problems with your code.
This is useful because as explained previously not all browsers interpret code in the same way. While some may correct or ignore the error, others will not. The validation service will find any errors in your code and allow you to fix them without having to discover the problem yourself.
Google Analytics or other traffic monitoring service.
Google Analytics is code placed in the footer of your web page that tracks visits to your blog. It records facts such as unique visitors, returning visitors, their country of origin and how they found your site. Google Analytics will show whether they entered your URL directly, followed a link from a referring site or found you via search results in Google or other search engines.
Using this information you can track the improvement of your site as time goes by and work on any areas that could use some attention. Your web most may also provide a similar traffic monitoring program which you can use instead of or as well as Google Analytics.
An about or welcome page
While the posts your publish are what’s going to bring people to your site, it’s important to have an about page to give you’re visitors some insight into who you are and what your about.
This is particularly important if your selling a service, these pages will probably be your visitors next stop after the post that they arrived on.
Social networking / bookmarking icons
Social bookmarking is a great way to spread and promote your content. If you visitors like what they read, social booking icons are a call to action for your readers to easily bookmark your post on their preferred social network such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon etc.
Having your readers continually bookmark you posts to these networks builds your sites exposure and possibly back-links depending on the particular site. Without these icons your readers are otherwise unlikely to promote your content in this way. If you’re looking for a place to start, the plug-in used on this site is SocioFluid.
That ought to do it.
It’s a long tedious list I know, but getting it done first will give you the best start you can have. If I’ve missed anything you think should be here let me know.
Don’t forget to use my social networking buttons *hint hint*
Great checklist, really useful.
Hi Lucas,
Glad to be of help.