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.
Questions to Ask When Starting a Website
I’ll begin with saying ground work to a site should not to be taken lightly. When creating websites in the past I’ve skipped these important questions.
It cost me time and money. You should always take the time to prepare yourself because you will learn soon that being a webmaster is not an easy one.
I’m sure right now you could be thinking what color will that cool dinosaur banner could be, or you may be trying to find some neat background for the site. Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s pretty common that right now your mind is racing with tons of ideas and the loads of drive to start your first/another website. While I of course would hate to eat up your time from finding the correct color for the dino banner, I do believe there are some questions that you need to keep in mind before even getting started with the graphics / technical process of site development.
1. What will be the subject/point of your site?
Well what is it? This can sometimes be a tricky question. Some people find themselves so excited about building a website; they never took the time to think about the point of the site. Really a website can be about anything, for some of the first time webmasters you may want to pick a hobby or you may want to make a site for your local bowling team. While more experienced webmasters may want to provide a service or products which would entail much more work than a simple site about hobbies.
Whichever it may be you need to define what you would like your website to be about, once you have that understanding you will have a clearer view of your obstacles.
2. What does a visitor expect from coming to or returning to your site?
Why would someone want to come to your site? If your website is a personal site with your hobbies, interest, or photos of your kids and while I’m sure everyone finds that very interesting (sarcasm) mainly the people visiting that site would be friends/family. If you provide a service or product you want visitors to expect what they would from any professional business they may walk into everyday.
Another question to ask is what will keep them coming? This is very important, you have to if you play on providing an informational service you need to know what will keep them coming for more. Once you know how to please your visitors they will enjoy coming to your site.
3. Will you have the passion to keep the site going long term?
Go ahead and call me guilty, because I have done this like so many others when it comes to taking on a project. I get so excited about it, even spending hours at a time trying to brainstorm and nothing comes of it.
You need to be sure that all your hard work will not go to waste.
Of course if you are simply creating your first site I encourage you to keep at it, even if the site you make doesn’t work out you will hopefully learn quite a bit and be more prepared with tackling your next side show attraction.
4. Who will be your target audience?
Trying to target products or services to the wrong target audience can hurt your visitor count. You will need to get an idea about who will be visiting your website for the information or products your providing and then design / word your site around that crowd. This will not only help you build and keep your target audience, it will also make your visitors feel right at home.
5. Do you have the time for maintaining a site?
We all wish we had the skills like “Time Wizard” and could stop time, but sadly we don’t. You will need to determine if you really have the time to work on the site as much as you want. Mostly everyone has a full-time / part-time job that will take up tons of time.
So you will need to make sure you set out time to baby your website. Providing updates and changes to the site is what will keep visitors returning. Most people will not keep coming to read the same articles over and over again.
Bottom line
I assume you took the time to think over each one of the questions. I can’t stress enough about not touching on some of these key points can really leave you disappointed in the future. I hope you now have a better general idea of your website and are the obstacles you may face.
