subject: Some Points To Check Before Make Website Live [print this page] Finally your website is ready with design and development process and you are eagerly waiting for the launch of your website. Finally your technical expertise and months of hard work are going to be live. But often you are getting so excited about you are completing the project that you tend to forget little things here and there. Here is some points that you need to refer before launching your website formally.
Forgot to give meta titles and descriptions is the common mistake done by every designer, also they are not end up using one title for all pages. But the title of the page is actually being the web page title and it is much important for SEO purpose. Title tags inform the search engine crawlers about what the web page is about and also help website visitors about the content before they read it. And same is the case with Meta tags and descriptions. You should make sure that you give unique titles and description for every page of your website.
Cross Browser Compatibility is also another important thing to check before make the website live. Sometimes website perfectly work and look in IE but when you are going to open it in firefox it could be an utter mess. Often designer forget to check their designs across multiple browsers and thus they don't have a hint if it doesn't work well o some. This leads to loss of precious web traffic. Surely check your website browser compatibility and ensure that your website work properly across major browsers like IE 6,7 and 8 Firefox 3, Safari 3, Chrome and the iPhone.
Grammatically correct and error free content is necessary in all websites. Visitors get information about your business and you through the content. One grammatical/spelling mistake in your website content make visitors to realize how serious and professional you are in your business. It is extremely important that you thoroughly check your website contents and make sure there are no errors or inconsistencies in the text. Read all the pages of your website your self and also make someone to read it. You would be surprised to note the mistakes that you yourself would have missed.
Broken links frustrate visitors so much. Visitors never come back to your site if in first time visit they found broken links. Scan your website from start to end and click through on all the links to check if they work and point to the right direction. Logo should always link to homepage. Also, make sure that all the links on the web page stand out very clearly, use different colors and underline for links. Also visited links should be presented in a different color.
404 error page is often forgotten design element in the website design process. 404 is the page that gets displayed when the user requests for a page that dosen't exist. It is very important to communicate with your users on the 404 error page and guide them back to the website. Explain your user what the problem is and why they have arrived on the 404 error page and provide a link back to the homepage or previous page from where they can start their browsing journey again.
