The Website Checklist

The approved website design has been coded, the completed site checked for design glitches, evaluated for cross browser compatibility and the copy has been thoroughly proof read. You think you are now ready to make your mark in the cyber world by launching your website. But wait; there are still some things that need to be checked before you can truly have a world class website.

Here are some small details that make the difference between a well designed website and a well implemented website:

Typically, one of the most neglected part of a website is what is beneath the hood. Many amateur website designers concentrate on making the front end beautiful, ignoring the excess code and comments in the back end. Make sure your code is clean, readable, and free of any superfluous code. 

Again, while all web designers know the importance of optimizing images for a website, not all of them follow it. Do not hesitate to ask your web designer if they have optimized the images used in the website, especially the Flash. 

Most beginning website designers leave it at the discretion of the programmer to write error / warning messages. The result can be grammatical / syntax errors and inconsistencies across the website. Ensure that the alerts and warnings are correctly worded.

In this context, one of the most important error messages that needs to be configured is the 'Page not found' error and the 'Page moved' error. Rather than hitting the visitor with a blunt 'Not found' message and leaving him wondering what to do next, you can configure your own, helpful messages, with a 'go to' option. 

More often than not, once the website is deployed and tested, there is a lot of data left on the server. Most of this is test data, usually in the demo folder. After the website is successfully deployed, make sure you delete all the unwanted data on the server.