Favicon
link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
And if you have an iPhone favicon:
link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/favicon.png" />
Titles And Meta Data
Cross-Browser Checks
Just when you think your design looks great, pixel perfect, you check it in IE and see that everything is broken. It’s important that your website works across browsers.
Proofread
Read everything. Even if you’ve already read it, read it again. Get someone else to read it.
Links
Don’t just assume all your links work. Click on them. You may often forget to add “http://” to links to external websites. Make sure your logo links to the home page, a common convention.
Functionality Check
Test everything thoroughly. If you have a contact form, test it and copy yourself so that you can see what comes through. Get others to test your website, and not just family and friends but the website’s target market.
Graceful Degradation
Your website should work with JavaScript turned off. Users often have JavaScript turned off for security, so you should be prepared for this. You can easily turn off JavaScript in Firefox.
Validation
You should aim for a 100% valid website. That said, it isn’t the end of the world if your website doesn’t validate, but it’s important to know the reasons why it doesn’t so that you can fix any nasty errors.
RSS Link
If your website has a blog or newsreel, you should have an RSS feed that users can subscribe to. Users should be able to easily find your RSS feed: the common convention is to put a small RSS icon in the browser’s address bar.
Put this code between your head tags.
link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Site or RSS title" href="link-to-feed" />
Analytics
Installing some sort of analytics tool is important for measuring statistics to see how your website performs and how successful your conversion rates are. Track daily unique hits, monthly page views and browser statistics, all useful data to start tracking from day 1.
Sitemap
Adding a sitemap.xml file to your root directory allows the major search engines to easily index your website. The file points crawlers to all the pages on your website. XML-Sitemaps automatically creates a sitemap.xml file for you.
Defensive Design
The most commonly overlooked defensive design element is the 404 page. If a user requests a page that doesn’t exist, your 404 page is displayed. This may happen for a variety of reasons, including another website linking to a page that doesn’t exist.
Optimize
You’ll want to configure your website for optimal performance. You should do this on an ongoing basis after launch, but you can take a few simple steps before launch, too.
Back Up
If your website runs off a database, you need a back-up strategy. Or else, the day will come when you regret not having one. If you use WordPress, install Wordpress Database Backup, which you can set up to automatically email you backups.
Print Style Sheet
If a user wants to print a page from your website, chances are she or he wants only the main content and not the navigation or extra design elements. That’s why it is a good idea to create a print-specific style sheet.
link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="print.css" media="print"
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