Before even thinking of launching a newly created website we should take great care at some basic but very important details. below is a list of 10 checks you should mark green prior to publish live your customer spanking new website.
Before the countdown, I suggest you to print this list, place it on your friendly A4 clipboard and start your check. After all the points have been marked successfully, then is time for Lobster, Champagne and Cigars.
1.Is the website ready with all pages displaying the correct copyright? If there are any pages unfinished or with glitches it is not a good idea to go live with the site. Your site visitors would think of your business the same way as you present your website and might not give you their trust.
2.Has the copyright been tested for spelling errors? Ask someone with knowledge and expertise to read your page content and give you some feedback, don’t be afraid of doing some extra changes, sometime we think our way is “the way”, while an external source could see things we had completely missed.
3.Have the links been tested throughout the all website? Broken links can be a goodbye from an interested user and surely they will not give you a professional look to the eyes of a new potential customer.
4.Have the email subscription, contact form, search form and any other forms you might have on your web pages been subject to a detailed scrutiny? This should be checked for errors and spelling mistakes, initial setup normally send mails to the web designer for debugging, once this is done all forms should be reverted to send the data to the proper email or save it on an internal database.
5.Is the Google map displaying the right information? It will be a disaster to find out after launch that your place is nowhere near the map displayed in your contact form.
6.Are the contact names, departments, address and telephone the right one? For extra security ask someone from the company you are developing the website to recheck prior to go live.
7.Are the social network accounts linking to the right account? And are they all displaying properly in the header, footer and articles pages? Again, make sure all the links are filled, if your client has no Instagram account leaving the icon with a hashtag as a link has no value and it should be removed. Explain to your client that you will add it as soon as the account has been setup.
8.Have you checked the loading time of your pages? Using online tools and websites that offer this services you should check that your animations, JavaScript and heavy sized images are not preventing the browser from loading the web pages within the normal time limits. Make sure all the images and graphics have been optimized for the web. (see webpagetest.org Google insights or uptrends.com for a full website analysis)
9.Have you written the page title, meta tags and site description according to what was already planned? This should affect all the pages in which you would like the search engines to easily find your content when crawling the web.
10.Have you included a favicon for the tabbed browser pages and an icon for iPhone users on your root directory?
Ok, now you should be ready to launch, however, there is still something you can do that will boost your income, here is what.
If the customer doesn’t have one and is willing to pay for your extra time, (and you have enough time) you can also prepare a plan for marketing and advertising, it could be very useful for them in order to have the website pushed a bit in the already crowded arena or similar sites and to get people to know the products or services your customer is willing to sell.
This is something I do whenever I work for small organizations that don’t have a proper Marketing Department. I bill my normal rates and I enjoy offering them a way to emerge from the unknown.
I will eventually write an article dedicated to how to organize a web site launch
Good luck for now.
Digital Designer, blog writer and also a tech enthusiast.
He loves to write content for blogs, podcasts, design websites, logos, brochures, banners and anything that sends a message to an audience.
You can contact Daniele at the link below:
