I was just putting together a list of things that should be done prior to launching a website. It only takes an hour to add them all, and it makes the world of difference.

Analytics

Make sure the site you launch has got analytics turned on. Worse-case you can change to another analytics provider. Careful if the site contains sensitive information.

Robots.txt

Put a robots.txt, even a blank one. Having a file existing is usually cheaper to webservers, than not having one. Especially if you have re-write rules. I have known sites to suffer from slow downs caused by robots.txt and favicon.ico’s

Favicon.ico

Put a favicon.ico file. It makes your site more professional and its much easier to see for through the forest of tabs. On big projects its nice to have different ones for dev, test and production.

Sitemap.xml

Add a sitemap.xml, use a generator, or automate it. I don’t mind. It just gets your content on google, yahoo, and alltheweb.com a million times faster. If your site doesn’t link to every page on the homepage then make sure you have a human sitemap too.

This inst an exhaustive list. The word of the day is Soporific so it looks like I have lost all my Smarticles this afternoon. What do you do add before go-live?

Joel

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