What to do before you launch a website

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What to do before you launch a website
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As a small business, by the time you complete the
process to build a website you are probably just
relieved that its finally finished, whew! But
there are some things that you (and or your web
provider) should do before the button is pressed.

• In this, Ill outline some of the thing we do and
  provide a bit of a checklist of what you can do
  before you go live with a new site.
• Remember when you decided to build a website for
  your business you must have had a reason for
  doing so? Increased sales? A more professional
  image? More leads? Whatever it was, now is the
  time to revisit that goal and determine how your
  site is looking in relation to it. Hopefully you
  havent lost site of this goal during
  development. If your goal is a measurable (like
  increase conversions by x or increase leads by x
  etc.) make sure you have a tool like Google
  Analytics set up to track the goal.

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• Show your friends and family first and get some
  feedback before you do the public launch. Tell
  them what you want from the site and ask them how
  well the site does in relation to what you are
  looking to achieve.
• Grab a coffee and give the site one final read
  through on every page. At worst its an excuse
  for another coffee.
• Do a quick final check in the common browsers
  (IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari) to make sure it
  all looks good.
• Test the contact form and make sure you get an
  email!
• Ensure you can log into the admin area, change
  basic text and upload files (in some cases the
  web developer will have to set permissions to
  enable you to upload files) .

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• Make sure both the http//www address and the
  http// for your domain work (i.e. if your domain
  is stevethebutcher.com.au visit
  http//www.stevethebutcher.com.au and
  http//stevethebutcher.com.au. One might forward
  to the other or they both might show the same
  thing. Either is fine as long as neither of them
  break.
• If the site was in a temporary directory before
  you launched the live version (for example
  www.yourdomain.com/beta) make sure it has been
  removed.
• The favicon is the little icon that appears in
  the browser tab and / or the address bar in the
  browser make sure you have one and it looks
  enough like your logo.
• Test all site components from start to finish
  (for example if there is a shopping cart
  installed run through a purchase (with real money
  change a product to 1c temporarily for the
  test) if there is a newsletter system test by
  sending a newsletter to a few different email
  clients such as Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo etc.).

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• Make sure you have access to a good reporting
  system (our free system CASBIR sends out a report
  each month with a good summary of a broad range
  of stats to do with a website). This system
  provides lots of different website measures
  including web stats from tools such as Awaits and
  Google Analytics but as a bare minimum make sure
  you have stats of some sort and its easy for you
  to monitor them (you can set up Google Analytics
  to send you a monthly web stat report as well).
• Click every link in the site and make sure none
  of them are broken. If its a larger site you
  might want to look at an automated tool for this
  such as broken link checker.
• Check the site is reasonably quick to load. Quick
  loading pages are good for users and a really
  slow site can harm your search engine position.
• Hopefully you have a good host so your backups
  will be all taken care of but make sure this is
  the case now (we would suggest backing up daily
  to the server and either weekly or monthly to a
  server in a different location). If you want to
  do them manually yourself every month or so you
  may be able to do this via the hosting control
  panel or via the CMS itself so check these
  options out now.

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