Are you ready to launch your site? You have no doubt been working a long time on the design,the content and you are almost ready to launch. Once you launch, people will start to arrive at your site and show you how well you have done it.

To make sure everything goes smooth, and that you avoid having problems, you should check before launching your site.

Cross-Browser Checks

A while ago, this was a true headache. Many people were still using IE6 and standards weren't being respected on many browsers. Today, although not every browsers respects all HTML and CSS, it’s a little easier to work with a site and be sure that it will look good on most sites. Nevertheless, you should test your site with some of the most popular browsers, at least the top five (Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Safari, Opera)

There are many places that offer the service of cross-browser checking, there are many paid options but here are some free ones:

• Bbrowser Shots: This page will take screenshots on how your site is seen by many different browsers.
• Browser Lab You'll need to create an AdobeID, but it’s free
• IE net renderer: To check just IE compatibility (IE6 and IE7 is really scary).

Smartphones Checking

A bad screenshot on IE6 shouldn't make you lose your sleep. Instead, check how your site looks on a smartphone. You should check at least iPhone and Android platforms

• Opera mini simulator: Opera mini is the best navigator for mobile devices; here you can check what your page is going to look like.
• iPhoney is not an iPhone simulator but it’s designed for web developers who want to create 320 by 480 (or 480 by 320) websites for use with iPhone.
• IpadPeek is an embedded application to check your site in the iPad.
• Android SDK: Android has its own SDK with an Android 2.0 emulator to see your website on those devices.

Include Google Analytics

Unless you have decided to use another statistical tool, this free tool from Google is really easy to implement and it will inform you how your site is going with plenty of information on your site users.

Check the Softcity search tool for “analytics” to find more information from users here.

Error 404 not found

Google provides their own 404 page if something on your site went wrong, but you should create your own 404 page that can help the user find what they were looking for and return to the original site.

Meta Data and Titles

The Title of your page is the most important piece of information, at least from the point of view of browsers and search engines:

You should have every page under your site with a good title that relates to the page content:

It should go under the <title></title> tags.

The second step for your site to be recognized by a search engine, is to have a Meta Description and keywords tags. Softcity’s Meta tag reads like this:

<meta name="description" content="Find software reviews and ratings from users and experts, communicate with developers and other users, and buy discount software on SoftCity.com."/> <meta name="keywords" content="software, software reviews, software ratings, software downloads, software user comments, discount software, free software download" />

You can do it by hand, but there are good online tools to do this:

• Meta Tag Generator
• Online Meta Tag
• Meta Tag Analyzer:

Links

This is the most basic element of any website, but sometimes it can go wrong. If you’re not thorough, you might have links directed to your personal computer or an old server. You should use the W3C Link Checker to see if all the links are working appropriately.

Favicon

Favicons are a small detail that many people forget about it. The favicon will appear at the beginning of your URL adress, at the top of the tab and even in the bookmark tab making your site easily recognizable. You have to save the Favicon in your root directory as a small image named favicon.ico and you should add this code in your head section:

<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico" />

And if you have a iPhone Favicon:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/favicon.png" />

Controlled Degradation

There are many users with many different computers, so even if you are not testing for every possible browser, you should check how your page works with a computer that doesn't use Frames, Javascript or Flash. Is your page still functional? Are there backup options for all of those problems? You should also test if all your forms still work with javascript deactivated.

HTML and XHTML Validation

It’s ok if your page is not 100% valid, but if you can validate both the HTML and the XHTML of your site it will be much easier for search engines and different browsers to understand what is happening on your site. You should use the W3C validator to check your site.

RSS Link

If your page provides any kind of content, you should have an RSS Link so your users can easily subscribe to your site and keep coming back. It’s pretty straight forward (and there are many tools that will help you with that, like the Google acquired Feed Burner.

You have to add the feed on your Header like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Site or RSS title" href="link-to-feed" />

Back Up

Don't forget to always have a backup system for your site. It’s not a big deal to set up and some day you will really, really appreciate doing it. WordPress Database Backup, can be set up to automatically email you backups.

SiteMap

Finally, by creating a sitemap.xml on your root directory, this file will allow the major search engines to easily index your website. You can automatically create this page using: XML-Sitemaps.

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