Your website is designed and it is time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget or overlook a number of details in your eagerness to get it live. It is useful to have a checklist to review as you make your final touches and before you officially release your website – to avoid unnecessary costs and provide the best user experience possible.

Favicon

A favicon brands the tab or window in which your website is open in the user’s browser. It is also saved with the bookmark so that users can easily identify pages from your website. Some browsers pick up the favicon if you save it in your root directory as favicon.ico, but to be sure it’s picked up all the time, include the following in your head.

Titles And Meta Data

Your page title is the most important element for SEO and is also important so that users know what is on the page. Make sure it changes on every page and relates to that page’s content.

Meta description and keyword tags aren’t as important for SEO (at least for the major search engines anyway), but it’s still a good idea to include them. Change the description on each page to make it relate to that page’s content, because this is often what Google displays in its search result description.

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. It doesn’t have to be pixel perfect, but everything should work, and the user shouldn’t see any problems. The most popular browsers to check are Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Chrome, Opera and the iPhone.