Website Launch Checklist

Think you’re ready to launch your new site? Well, before you take down your coming soon page, its a good idea to make sure that you site is indeed finished.

Here are ten things to consider before you go live:

• Do all of your pages have unique and relevant titles?
• Have you created custom error pages?
• Does your website look the same in all browsers? At minimum, verify that your site looks the same in FireFox and Internet Explorer.
• Has all content been proofread for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors? And are you using a font size large enough to be comfortably read by your visitors?
• Does your site load quickly? Have all images and graphics been optimized? And have you made use of ‘alt’ tags?
• Have you created a robots.txt file? (Note: This is not necessary for inclusion in search engine indexes. However, if you’d like to prevent certain pages from being crawled, you should create this file.)
• Are all links functioning properly? Is site navigation in a prominent location and simple and easy to use?
• Have you added meta tags – such as keywords and descriptions – to your pages?
• Did you create a favicon.ico image? (See our article on Favorites Icons.)
• Have you added contact information?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of things that you should check before launching your website. However, it is a good starting point.

You should also be sure to consider whether or not your website will meet your goals, as well as whether it will fulfill the needs of your potential visitors. One easy way to do this is to put together a focus group. Perhaps you can solicit help from friends or coworkers, or even employees. Show them your website, and get them to give suggestions and feedback. And you might be surprised to see what you have overlooked.

It is also a good idea to verify that your site has valid HTML markup. Check out this free Markup Validation Service from W3C which gives helpful tips on fixing your code. There is also a CSS validation tool.