So you've designed a website and the customer is happy. It's time to go live, right? No. The giddiness derived from the prospect of actually getting to invoice the customer can often cloud your thought processes. So here is a list (not all-encompassing, but still a list) of things to do and check before you go live with your customer's new site.
Keep in mind this is from the developer's perspective. I write a lot about the small business owner, so I don't want the (un)educated small biz owner to get confused. I know some of us techno-geeks speak geek speak too much, so please don't think that this is for you small business owners. This is for us geeks only.
First step in good design: sketching
1. SEO Keyword Integration
I personally require my clients to write their own copy, but I have "final" say in editing (not really, but it makes me sound important, doesn't it?). Why? Because I need to integrate the relevant keywords and key phrases into the text. Of course, I don’t change what the overall page is attempting to relay, I just integrate the keywords and phrases people are searching. Minor changes can make a huge difference.
For instance, one of my longest customers, Holiday World of Houston, did NOT want me to use the phrase “Used RVs” in their site. They drank the whole “the term ‘used’ is a negative connotation thus we want to use the term ‘pre-owned’” thought process kool-aid. I convinced them that people don’t search for “pre-owned”, but rather “used” (to about an 11:1 ratio). Their related traffic quadrupled within the next quarter. 'Nuff said!
2. Relevant Page Titles
For the same reasons as above, except that Google places a very high importance on page titles. The worst-ever thing you can do, from both a usability and an SEO perspective, is omit a page title. And “Contact Websites That Work” as a page title is mucho better than “Contact Us”. Why? Just think of the millions of pages out on the information super highway that have the term “Contact Us”. Unless your business name is “Us”, this isn’t relevant.
Also, if you are using an editor such as Dreamweaver, unless you set a page title, it will put “Untitled Document” as the page title. A quick search rendered 50,600,000 results for "Untitled Document". Wanna compete with that?
3. File Naming
For SEO purposes, it is important to include specific terms relevant to the data they contain. Use hyphens instead of underscores, as a genuine Google-dudette (Vanessa Fox) says it is best to do so. She states that the file name “african-elephants.html” is seen as two words (African and elephant) whereas African_elephant.html is seen as one word. So you have a better chance that someone will search for “African elephant” vs. “African_elephant” as their search term.
4. Google Analytics
Whether you are creating a new site or upgrading an existing one, be sure and include the site-specific Google Analytics code into every page of the new site. This will help you monitor changes in traffic, pages per visit, new visits and bounce rates.
If you are building a new site, one thing you should do as soon as you sign a contract is put the code on each page of the existing site (if they haven’t already done so). This will at least let you monitor the traffic for a short time (some take longer than others ;) before the new site goes live. This will at least give you some type of difference for very important items like bounce rate and page views.
5. Server-Side Includes for Headers, Footers and Navigation
It is SO much easier to maintain and make updates to any site if these are broken out into separate includes. And if your customers are anything like mine, they usually want a 1/8” separation between their logo and some other text in the header, it is a maximum 30 second change to an include file rather than a 30 minute ordeal editing each page.
6. Copyright
Along with the above tip, this one can be easily remedied by placing in the footer and adding some quick JavaScript code to make sure that it renders in future years without touching. Just add something like the following:
© 2008 (By the way, when using the copyright symbol, you don’t need to put the text “Copyright”. Just a pet peeve of mine.)
<script language="javascript">
var d=new Date();
yr=d.getFullYear();
document.write("©2008 ");
if (yr!=2008)
document.write("- "+yr+"<br/>");
</script>
All Rights Reserved.
7. Links Back to Your Own Bad Self
As part of each contract, I ask my customer if it is okay to put a link back to my own site. I haven’t had one deny it yet. This helps your own site’s page rank. But don’t simply just put a link with your company name, make the links relevant using text and titles in the link. Putting another link to My Web Dev Company Name probably already has your site’s SERP pretty high, so it is a wasted link. Make it relevant to what you do using your own SEO for your site. Something like "Small business web development by Websites That Work"
8. Font Size
Dude, use relative font sizes, such as % or em UNLESS it is directly for the purposes of formatting a particular element. Good practice to set all font sizes to em, then go back and set larger fonts to absolute sizes if zooming breaks layout/format.
9. Link Validation
Before going live, I always use one of the many online link checkers to tell me if any of my links are broken. Just do a search for link checker on Google. This is just good business.
10. Spelling
Even though I have my customer write the copy for each page, I copy and paste the text of each page into Word to check spelling. This is the last thing I do before going live. Even with my advanced speling and grammer skillz, it still helps with fragment sentences and poor grammar checks.
Keep in mind, sometimes mis-spellings have benefits. I have purposely used commonly mis-spelled words in my text if SEO analysis shows that people have that tendency. One of my customers installs garage doors. Believe it or not, I found that some people (they’ve GOT to be from Texas) have a tendency to spell “garage” as “garge”.
11. Form Validation and Functionality
Test all web forms for form validation (if your customer requires it) and ensure that all form data gets sent properly and to the proper people. Get confirmation from each email at the customer site that they did indeed receive any emails you sent from the form. This, again, is just good business.
12. Sitemaps
All sites should have a sitemap of some sort that search engines can use to crawl the entire site. On smaller sites (30 pages or less), I put a link to every page in the footer of the page. Otherwise, create a page that categorizes the different areas of the site, with links to each page at least once. This will ensure that some of the non-google search engines will see each page.
13. Google Sitemaps
Firstly, please read Google’s information about Google Sitemaps and make sure you understand the importance of proper importance ranking and crawl intervals. Then go to one of the many, many free Google Sitemap generators and create a Google Sitemap. After it is created, edit it for importance and interval, then upload it to the site. Don’t forget to add it too Google, either.
14. Cross-Browser Checks
There are plenty of free and not-so-free cross-browser checking sites and software out there. I recently found IE Tester, and found it to work quite nicely for testing differences between the various (and so ridiculous) versions of Internet Explorer (BTW – I am fairly excited about IE9 – it is a step in the right direction!).
15. Get Sign-Off From the Customer
The most obvious is the also the most important. After you have done all of the above, ensure your customer is smelling what you are stepping in. This ensures your happiness as well as theirs. Plus, it puts the honus on them if something isn't just right.
Not to forget...
For some of the more advanced customers, here are some other items to think about:
What's Next?
In my next blog post, I'll talk about what to do after your new site goes live, from a customer's perspective.