Are You Sure Your Website Is Ready To Go Live?
Website creation requires a well thought out plan to be successful.
If you are planning to build a website for promoting your brand among your target audience over the internet, or you have already build a website and planning to launch it soon, just wait to note down few important points that you shouldn’t ignore at all. Whether you are owner of a website or the developer /designer of a website, you must know the appropriate checklist to understand if your web site is ready for a thriving launch or not.
Just like when you prepare homemade soup, you have a lot of ingredients, but still you check it before presenting it to anyone to ensure its taste, similarly launching a website requires some essential steps for ensuring its victory among your challenging competitors.
Why Planning is Necessary for Successful Website Launch?
Setting a definite goal for your website is necessary, but the first crucial step before entering in the process of website development and its launch is a “good planning” because it is essential for ensuring success of your site.
http://www.digitaldoughnut.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/024/01.jpg Just like we make planning before preparing any delicious dish, adequate planning is required in the process of website launch to accomplish its key aim of establishing its brand value over the internet.
There are few points that every website owner must remember for ensuring success of their website before its launch:
- You must create your own action plan that begins with the selection of your domain name to hitting the button that would be required for publishing your first blog post.
- The content that is required for your website must be SEO-friendly and high quality as well to ensure better ranking over search engines with enhanced user engagement.
- You might have well-established business running smoothly offline, but to establish your identity via a good website is a bit difficult task. Here is an effective website launch checklist that you will need for your startup website’s success.
1. Choose the Suitable Domain Name
In this techno savvy world, where people are constantly involved on internet for accessing information, it is necessary to have a domain name that reflects your business and your services. Naming your website might seem obvious for you, but it is very effective for a simple reason that people will know about your business through your domain name only over the World Wide Web.
It acts as the foundation stone for the establishment of your brand among your target audiences and an impressive or informative domain name might be able to pull more traffic than a simple domain name.
Coolest-gadgets.com is one of the finest examples of a website with reflective domain name. Being a trendy gadget blogging site, it has over 70,000 subscribers and to continue its huge readership realm, it has chosen a perfect domain name for its blogging site that exhibit its aim of offering information about the coolest gadgets across the globe.
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2. Cross-Browser Checking
Once you think that your website design is complete and looking perfect with all pixels set, you should check the compatibility and look of your website across different browsers. Ensure that everything displayed on your website displays well on all browsers without any problems and the most popular browsers for checking the compatibility and feel of your website are Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari3, Firefox, and Opera.
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3. Check Your Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
The titles of your web pages are very important for scoring higher ranks in search queries of internet users. Hence, it is important that all Meta titles of your web pages are uniquely written and changes with every web page.
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Another important factor is to include Meta descriptions for your all web pages as they might not play any role in search engine optimization process of your website, but this is often what Google shows in search results as a description about your web page.
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4. Proofread Your Site
Once your website is ready for launch, you should scramble for new contributors and content to improve the professionalism of your website. Read everything displayed on your website to ensure its quality and content. You can also take the help of someone else for proofreading your entire website’s content because there is always something that you could pick up for change.
Other important points for proofreading involve:
- Make sure to keep the content on your website specific and not very lengthy without any punctuation, spelling or grammar errors.
- You can also add concise and clear headlines all across your blog posts so that users can easily scan your web content to extract the essential information.
- Dynamic text can also be effective for enhancing the impressiveness of your website.
- Unique content is must for setting your website apart from your competitors.
5. Evaluate Your Website for JavaScript Compatibility
Your website must be able to work when the JavaScript is turned off. Most of the internet users turn off the JavaScript for ensuring security of their computers or laptops and hence, it is mandatory to ensure whether it works perfectly while JavaScript is turned off or not. You can conveniently do it while turning off the JavaScript of your website in Firefox and then you can test your forms to ensure if they are performing well on server-side validation checks or you can also test any other AJAX stuff that you are using with your website.
6. Check for the Validation of Your Website
Your website should be 100% valid before it goes live. However, it doesn’t mean that your website will never achieve success if it doesn’t validate, but it is essential for you to know that if your website doesn’t validate, there will be some nasty errors in future that will hinder its performance as well. These common errors include:
- No “alt” tags
- Using “&” instead of “&”
- No closing tags
You can use the validation tools available online for validating your website before its launch and W3C markup Validation is an effective tool where you can validate your website by entering the URI, Direct Input or File Upload.
7. Integrate RSS Link
If you have a blog or news read section on your website, then it is important to integrate the RSS feed link to your website that your target audience can easily subscribe to. Moreover, the audiences should be able to find your RSS feed icon and hence, you can put the icon in the address bar of the browser.
8. Add a SiteMap
At last, don’t forget to include a sitemap.xml file in the root directory of your website for indexing it on popular search engines. This file will point the crawlers to all your web pages and then you can automatically create this file via XML-Sitemaps and then you can upload this file to its proper location, which is www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.
However, if your website is created on Wordpress, then you can install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin on your site, which will update your sitemap automatically whenever you will write new posts.
So, these are some very essential checklist that helps in readying your website for a successful launch. However, if you have any other points in your mind, you could share with us in the comments box.
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