So, the extensive design and development process is finally finished and you are anxiously waiting for your site to go live for the first time. It’s finally time that the world sees the results of your hard work and creativity. Everything is in place and ready to go…or is it? Be sure that in the midst of your excitement, you didn’t overlook the small things. At ISOCNET, we test each website over and over registering several hours through each phase of development. We don’t let little things go unnoticed. However, for the rest of you, here is a four point checklist you need to refer to before taking your website live.

Be sure to triple check every page and all content for grammatical and spelling errors. It only takes one spelling error or grammatically incorrect sentence for visitors to see your company as unprofessional and careless. It is vital that you check all content thoroughly for any mistakes or inconsistencies. One of the best ways to do this is to have a few different people look over it. You would be surprised how many mistakes you yourself would have missed.

Verify that all of the links throughout the entire site are working and pointing to the right place. Nothing is more frustrating to visitors than broken links. If you change a page, be sure the new URL is linked properly to other pages and the navigation. Your logo should always link back to your homepage. Ensure that all links stand out on the page. They should be underlined and made a different color than the rest of your text. Links visited by your visitors should be shown in a different color. Visit http://linkchecker.sourceforge.net/ to download free software to quickly check links on your site.

Don’t forget to include the title tags, Meta descriptions, and Meta keywords for all pages on your site. These are crucial to optimize SEO benefits. Title tags are the title of the web page. Meta Descriptions are the paragraph that appears under your site link on search engine results. Meta Keywords are the words or phrases that pull your site to the results page when a search is made.  Meta descriptions and keywords are unique descriptions, words, and phrases to each page so search engine crawlers like Google and Yahoo! can index your page. Excluding any of these may interfere with obtaining optimal SEO benefits. 

Just because your website looks perfect in Internet Explorer (IE) doesn’t mean it will look great in Firefox, Chrome, or other web browsers. If you don’t check your site in all browsers, you may lose valuable web traffic to your site. Perform a cross browser compatibility check and confirm that the website functions properly and looks consistent across major browsers including IE 6, 7, and 8, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and, of course, the iPhone. 

Now, you've completed the checklist and your website has been reviewed, scrutinized, and turned upset down and inside out, so it’s time to see all your hard work, time, and effort across the globe. It’s time to go live!