10 Things You Must Do Before Launching a New Site

Starting a website in any niche is hard work. We have to be prepared for it and be preparing ourselves for the type of visitors we’ll be gaining. Is if our website is boutique related like Cane Boutique is? We have to ensure that we’re catering to those visitors in our planning. So following is the list of ten things we must usually check while launching a new website :

1. Create (Or Hire Someone To Create) A Killer Design

We believe that design is one of the most important items for a website, especially one that is geared towards gaining clients and/or readership. Yes, if we’re running a blog, our content needs to be great, but the design is what catches the viewer’s attention first – so we should make a good impression.

We can check the following things for a website design what we often miss :

(A) Favicon

A favicon brands the tab or window in which our website is open in the user’s browser. It is also saved with the bookmark so that users can easily identify pages from our website. Some browsers pick up the favicon if we save it in our root directory as favicon.ico, but to be sure it’s picked up all the time, include the following in your head.
<link rel=”icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”/favicon.ico” />

And if you have an iPhone favicon :
<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/favicon.png” />

(B) Cross-Browser Checks

Just when we think that our design looks great, pixel perfect, we check it in IE and see that everything is broken. It’s important that our website works across browsers. It doesn’t have to be pixel perfect, but everything should work, and the user shouldn’t see any problems. The most popular browsers to check are Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Chrome, Opera and the iPhone.

2. Plan Out A Month Or So Worth Of Content

There’s no reason to launch a site if we have nothing to show but 1-2 posts. We’d suggest having 4-5 posts up live and 10+ in the holster, ready to post every few days after the launch. This will let people know we’re serious about the site and will also give time to promote the site. We should chat it up with other people in our niche to get some exposure and to write more content.
We should also read everything. Even if we’ve already read it, we should read it again. We should get someone else to read it. There’s always something we’ll pick up on and have to change. See if we can reduce the amount of text by keeping it specific. We should break up large text blocks into shorter paragraphs. Also need to add clear headings throughout and we should use lists so that users can scan easily. We shouldn’t forget about dynamic text too, such as alert boxes.

3. Set Up All Of Our Google Accounts

We should make sure we set up Google Analytics, Gmail, Webmaster tools, Sitemaps, Feedburner etc… We need to set them all up and make sure they’re all working properly so that when we launch, everything is in full running order. There’s nothing worse than launching a site, only to find out 2 days later that your feedburner link was broken or you forgot to set up analytics to track your traffic stats.

Installing some sort of analytics tool is important for measuring statistics to see how our website performs and how successful our conversion rates are. Track daily unique hits, monthly page views and browser statistics, all useful data to start tracking from day.

1. Google Analytics is a free favorite among website owners. Others to consider are Clicky, Kissmetrics (still in closed beta yet), Mint and StatCounter.

4. Sitemap

Adding a sitemap.xml file to our root directory allows the major search engines to easily index our website. The file points crawlers to all the pages on our website. XML-Sitemaps automatically creates a sitemap.xml file for us. After creating the file, upload it to your root directory so that its location is www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.

If we use WordPress, install the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in, which automatically updates the sitemap when we write new posts. Also, add our website and sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. This tells Google that we have a sitemap, and the service provides useful statistics on how and when your website was last indexed.

5. Defensive Design

The most commonly overlooked defensive design element is the 404 page. If a user requests a page that doesn’t exist, our 404 page is displayed. This may happen for a variety of reasons, including another website linking to a page that doesn’t exist. Get the users back on track by providing a useful 404 page that directs them to the home page or suggests other pages they may be interested in.

Another defensive design technique is checking the forms for validation. We should try submitting unusual information in our form fields (e.g. lots of characters, letters in number fields, etc.) and make sure that if there is an error, the user is provided with enough feedback to be able to fix it.

6. Optimize

We should configure our website for optimal performance. We should do this on an ongoing basis after launch, but we can take a few simple steps before launch, too. Reducing HTTP requests, using CSS sprites wherever possible, optimizing http://dreamztech.com/blog/images for the Web, compressing JavaScript and CSS files and so on can all help load your pages more quickly and use less server resources.

Besides, depending on the publishing engine that we are using, we may need to consider taking more specific measures – for instance, if we are using WordPress, we may need to consider useful caching techniques to speed up the performance.

7. Links

Don’t just assume that all our links work. We should click on them. We may often forget to add “http://” to links to external websites. We should make sure that our logo links to the home page, a common convention.

Also, think about how our links work. Is it obvious to new users that they are links? They should stand out from the other text on the page. We shouldn’t underline text that isn’t a link because it will confuse users. And what happens to visited links?

8. Validation

We should aim for a 100% valid website. That said, it isn’t the end of the world if your website doesn’t validate, but it’s important to know the reasons why it doesn’t so that you can fix any nasty errors. Common gotchas include no “alt” tags, no closing tags and using “&” instead of “&amp;” for ampersands.

9. RSS Link

If our website has a blog or newsreel, we should have an RSS feed that users can subscribe to. Users should be able to easily find your RSS feed: the common convention is to put a small RSS icon in the browser’s address bar.
Put this code between your <head> tags.


<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Site or RSS title” href=”link-to-feed” />

10. Print Style Sheet

If a user wants to print a page from your website, chances are she or he wants only the main content and not the navigation or extra design elements. That’s why it is a good idea to create a print-specific style sheet. Also, certain CSS elements, such as floats, don’t come out well when printed.

To point to a special CSS style sheet that computers automatically use when users print a page, simply include the following code between your <head> tags.

< link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”print.css” media=”print” />