19 Important Factors Before Launching Your Website
When launching a website many developers often forget some factors that should be consider before making everything public.
This article reviews some of the important factors many forget during the web development process. Forgetting these can add up to huge problems in the future. Considering these items will help user experiences and may save a few headaches down the road.
1. Favicon
A favicon is a form of branding. It allows user to recognize your site from others when bookmarking a page or having your site opened in a tab. All sites should have these icons.
Place this code in your <head> tag to enable a favicon:
2. Title & Meta Data
Search Engines rely on these tags to provide title and description information for search results. Title tags are the most element for SEO and tells visitors the idea of that webpage.
The description and keyword tag are not as important for SEO but still a good idea to include.
3. Turn off Index Browsing
This often is forgotten during the process of launching a website. Index browsing allows the viewing of files within your directory. They can see everything. It’s important to remember to turn this off for better security and for protecting your files.
• For cPanel users, there is an option in the Index Manager
• How to disable directory browsing using .htaccess
4. Cross Browser Compatibility
This can become a huge headache but it is essential that your website appear correctly in major browsers. You do not want a percent of your audience unable to view your website.
The days of placing buttons in your footer stating “Best Viewed in Firefox” are long gone.
Instead of downloading multiple browsers, try Browsershots or Browserlabs.
5. Validation
Aim for 100% validation, but realize it may not happen.
Validating your website will point out errors that may have missed while coding and help with overall cross-browser compatibility. W3C Markup Validation Service will check your HTML, CSS, RSS, and even broken links.
6. Sitemap
These consist of links to all the content placed within your website. Search engines can use sitemaps to crawl your website efficiently. They normally come in .XML form but you may write them in HTML as well.
• Creating an XML Sitemap Manually
• If you are a WordPress user, try Google Sitemap XML for WordPress
7. Optimize Everything
You should always optimize your CSS, HTML, JavaScript and images. Optimizing your files will reduce load times and bandwidth consumed by your audience.
CleanCSS can fix errors, optimize, and properly format CSS. Smush.it by Yahoo, will optimize all the images on a web page without losing the quality.
8. Custom 404/Error Pages
The default 404 page is useless for your audience. You should customize your 404 page with a link back to your homepage or even a search function for better usability.
9. Back-up Plan
Always have a recent backup of your website because one day you may lose it all. I’ve had my web host experience issues before and backing up saved my life.
You should always have a backup plan.
• How to Perform Full Backup to Backup Website in CPanel Hosting
• 8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers
10. Check Functionality
After you build your website, it’s perfect for you, but not others.
A good idea is to have complete strangers navigate the website. By picking people you do not know, you can be sure they will be upfront about criticism.
11. Track Your Traffic
As you site grows having useful traffic information is important.
Installing an analytics tool helps measure statistics on how your site is performing. They track daily hits, browser statistics, user by country, and more. The number one free analytics tool is Google Analytics.
12. Print Style Sheet
If you have a lot of content on your site, users may want to print some of it off for various reasons. To help usability it is important to create a print style sheet so those users only print off the content and not the rest of the website.
13. Outline Site Policies
All sites should have some sort of policy on copyright, reprint, and if you advertise products, you need a full disclosure with your readers. These rules help protect you and your visitors.
• Creative Commons, anything concerning a copyright
• Federal Trade Commission Regulations on Affiliate Marketing for December 2009
14. Provide Contact Information
Readers often want to be involved. They will email you about mistakes, bugs, questions, and suggestions. But more importantly it helps build trust with readers, allowing them to email you if ever required.
15. Subscribe via RSS or Email
To help keep your audience entwined, offer ways for them to find out about new updates without having to visit your website.
Internet users are contently browsing and having a hard time visiting them all. Allowing readers to subscribe will remind them about any updates that occur.
• How to Create an RSS 2.0 Feed
• Track your subscribers with Feedburner.
16. Social Marketing
After launching your website the work does not end there. You need not only to continue updating it, but you need to promote your site across the Internet.
Before your website even launches make sure you secure the name of your website on some of the major social networks. Start with Twitter & Feedburner since the username you chose will show up in the URL.
17. Prepare Content
I suggest that you have at least 15 pages of unique content before launching a website and be prepared to release more of it as the website improves.
Start by writing down the topic of the pages then move on to writing the content.
• How to Write for the Web, by Jakob Nielsen.
18. Proofread
Read everything you write, multiple times. There will be mistakes you miss the first time reading through or someone else may notice. We are all guilty of making mistakes. I would not worry about the minor stuff too much.
When writing for the Internet remember to break up your thoughts. Try adding elements such as headers and bulletins as most users just browse content instead of reading it all.
And always, keep it short be brief.
19. Submit to Search Engines
Normally, major search engines will find you in no time if you have others linking to your website. However, you should submit a sitemap and sign up for the webmaster services offered by both Google & Yahoo.
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RobertMarch 5, 2010 at 9:25 pm
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DoriaMarch 21, 2010 at 2:41 pm
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Carlos CarvalhoApril 4, 2010 at 1:37 pm
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Nrg-1June 8, 2010 at 11:45 pm
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