Okay, so you’ve got your great new design. The code is tight, and the content is all there and approved. Now you’re all ready to push that upload button, but hang on there – there’s just a few things you should check off this list before the big launch.
11. Meta tags
Have you put in the relevant keywords and description? You’d be amazed by how often this is forgotten even on high budget websites by big agencies. This will affect your sites performance exponentially. Make sure this is done!
10. Favicon
More of a style choice than a necessity, but it is expected these days for professional sites to have a small graphical representation of the website name or logo in the URL bar. Makes it easy for people to find your site among the jungle of tabs they have up. Also it makes it easier for people to remember your site, so long as your favicon is simple and effective.
9. Browser compatibility check
Okay so it works in IE8 and Firefox3. That’s great. What about the other half of the world using Safari, Opera, IE7, IE6 and Google Chrome? Well you should probably be catering for them too. Time to install all the browsers under the sun.
8. HTML version
So you have put together a beautiful Flash based site. Fantastic. Everyone has flash right? Yeah pretty much. But if I was to load it up on my BlackBerry or my iPhone, it’s not going to work. It’s best to simplified HTML version of the site – primarily for mobile users, but also for dinosaurs that own desktop computer from the late 90s.
7. Site map
Adding a sitemap to your root directory allows search engines to easily index your site. It’s not hard to create an XML based sitemap, and there are plenty of tools out there that do this for you.
6. Check the links
Click all the links. Make sure they all work. Do the right ones open in a new window?
Do the external ones work? A really common oversight is not using absolute paths, that is, skipping the front part of the URL. This might work now – but might mess things up if the folder was moved. Also make sure HTTP:// is used at the front of all external links.
5. Check loading time
How quickly does your site load? Make sure you test this on the actual server the website will be running on. The local server or your own desktop will not give an accurate representation of this. If it does load slow, make sure all you images (ALL OF THEM) are optimised and correctly compressed. Check all rich media content, and it’s also better if all files are hosted on the same server. If it’s fetching content from other servers – this can bottleneck the whole site. A few seconds might not seem like much – but remember it will be a lot worse on slow or mobile connections.
4. JavaScript Issues
Look at the bottom right corner of the browser. It should never be reporting any javascript errors. It’s becoming more common these days for professional websites to have javascript errors, as long as the website works (more or less). This is unacceptable. It just looks like you don’t care. And on that note, your website should also work without javascript enabled. Many people disable it for security reasons.
3. RSS feeds
If your site is a blog, or has any kind of newsfeed at all, you should have an RSS feed. It’s really easy to set it up. Also it should be easy to find and access the RSS feed. Putting a small line of code in your <head> tag will give you the RSS icon in the browsers URL bar.
2. Counters, analytics, Stats
I’ve literally seen loads of high budget commercial sites get launched without any analytics or statistics tools setup. It’s easy to forget this for the designer, but this is of extreme importance to the client. There are a lot of ones out there, commercial and free. Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is perhaps the most popular free one. It’s also worth checking out Clicky (http://getclicky.com/), Mint (http://haveamint.com/) and StatCounter (http://www.statcounter.com/).
1. Check the copy, yes again.
Read it. Read it again. Get your friend to read it. Get your mum to read it. For gods sake get a copywriter to read it. Just because you got a A in 10th Grade English class doesn’t mean you are any good at understanding the intricate complexities of the English language. Oh and your spelling probably sucks too.
Oh and here is a bonus tip. Don’t EVER launch something on a Friday evening. I know you’ve been working all week, and you just want to get it out – so you don’t have to worry about it cause you know nothing will go wrong… let me tell you, it most definitely will. You don’t want problems arising over the weekend (when internet usage can be up) and you don’t have resources available to you to attend to them. Leave it till Monday morning.
Roger Sho Gerhmann
Creative Director