I was helping a friend review a site she recently launched. Right around “Do you have a favicon?” I realized that I had the makings of a good blog post.
Hitting my late-30s has to be good for something.
During Development
Content & SEO
- Define a filenaming scheme and stick to it – camelback, underscores, or hyphens – it really doesn’t matter. Consistency is important – it looks professional and you cut down on bad links because one developer used underscores and another chose camelback.
- Don’t leave page titles to your developers. Page titles are critical – they’re strong influencers for SEO, and they’re what people see in search engines when your page comes up in the results. Good page titles increase click thrus.
- And that also means no site-wide page titles. Title each page individually and use relevant keywords.
- Create an XML sitemap
- Create a favicon.ico for browsers and a favicon.png for iPhones. See below for a code snippet for iPhones.
<linkrel="apple-touch-icon"href="/favicon.png"/>
Links
- Keep a list of any hard-coded links to dev, staging or QA to use during rollout.
- Define a policy for off-site links – should they open in a new tab, new window, or same window?
Cross-Browser Checks
- Define your target list of browsers. Put them into two categories
- Certified – this is the list of browsers you will actively test against. List browsers and version numbers.
- Supported – this list includes browsers that share commonalities with a browser on the certified list. While you won’t test in these browsers you’re pretty certain that the site will look good in them. Firefox 3.6 and 3.5 is an example of a certified and supported browser. As much as you’d like it though, Firefox 3.5 and IE 6 is not.
- Choose if/how you’re developing for mobile.
- If you’re re-launching a site, consult your analytics to choose your browser matrix.
- If you’re creating an intranet site, use the corporate standard browsers.
- If you’re launching a new domain, use Market Share or another site that monitors browser usage stats. Mutter your bewilderment that IE6 still has the largest share.
Data provided by MarketShare.
Reporting
- Define tracking and reporting requirements, such as:
- Off-site links
- Downloadable files
- Flash usage
- Video usage
- Signups for newsletters, etc.
- referrers
- time stamp
- unsubscribes
- E-mail
- opens
- click thrus
- unsubscribes – how much detail? just the timestamp? or, which email did they unsubscribe from?
- Give your dev team the code for your web site tracking.
Ecommerce
- If you need an SSL cert, order it early. I’m always surprised (dumbfounded?) by how hard it is to track down who has access to the administrative contact email address within an organization. Unfortunately, you need confirmation from that account in order to purchase an SSL cert.
- Confirm you have merchant accounts from each credit card provider – e.g. Visa/Mastercard, Amex, Discover.
- Put your credit card processing in test mode.
QA
Functional Testing
- Test all forms.
- Test email functionality including receipt of emails outside of the network.
- Test search, including relevance of search results.
- Confirm pages print well.
- Turn off browser extensions – Flash, JavaScript, etc.
- Test sign up with a completely new account.
- Test a purchase with each credit card type. Confirm you’re in test mode before you do.
Performance
- Minify JavaScript and CSS.
- Confirm images have been appropriately compressed.
- Confirm large JavaScript is being referenced in a separate JS file so it can be cached.
- Web Page Analyzer can be used to identify potential problem areas.
Just Before Launch
- Do a global search for any dev, staging or QA URLs. Yes, I know you meticulously kept a list, but you can bet someone on your team was in a hurry at 3AM one night and hardcoded a link just to get through QA tomorrow morning.
- Confirm the code for web site tracking has been inserted. Spot check several pages. Better yet, have a discussion with your dev team to understand how they cut up the templates. Is the tracking code in a global include file? Or, is it in each template? If it’s in each template, ask them to identify all the templates.
- Clear the DB of any test data.
- Remove any test pages from the CMS.
- Eliminate canonical URL variances. Select a single way to refer to your site, e.g. www.mysite.com or mysite.com.
- Setup permanent redirects (HTTP 301) for any canonical permutations. Don’t dilute your SEO by having variations of your URLs floating out there.
- Setup 404 and 500 error pages. 404 pages can list popular pages or direct users to a sitemap. 500 pages should explain that an error has occurred. An apology is a nice touch too.
- Review the XML sitemap and update as necessary.
- Change credit card processing from test mode to live mode.
Post-Launch
- Confirm the reporting code snippet made it to production. Why am I so obsessed with this? Since it’s invisible to visitors it’s SUPER EASY to not notice that it’s missing. Better to be obsessed now than possessed later when you find out you haven’t been collecting data for the past month.
- Confirm the data is populating your reporting tool.
- Test 404 and 500 error pages.
- Test that all canonical variants are permanently redirecting to your domain of choice.
- Submit to search engines.
- Test a purchase with each credit card type.
- Once the purchases have processed successfully, void them immediately. You want to void versus crediting because some processors ding accounts that have a lot of credits.
- Check formatting of site links in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
And don’t forget that all-important final task – teambuilding (i.e. go out for drinks and make fun of all the stupid people you put up with during development).
It’s a big list but it’s really 3 lists in one. And even though it’s long I’ll bet I’ve missed a bunch.
What are some of the things on your list that I missed?
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