1. Make sure you have a good domain name
Okay, It’s hard to get a good domain name nowadays, especially with pretty much every good .com combination taken. However, .net domains are becoming rather popular (take a look at our domain name!) and I’ve seen them popping up all over the web. Now I’m not saying to totally disregard the .com domain name, I mean, it is the most popular, so try and get it if you can. Rather, try out different combinations. A nice and rather cool thing to do now is to make your domains make words, such as del.icio.us did before it bought delicious.com
If you have a domain name picked already, you could ignore this point, but remember to pick something that doesn’t leave you cringing 3 years down the line (if it’s still running).
Having Trouble? Here’s Some Help
2. Clean up your code
Okay, as a web developer I know how difficult it is to “clean” your code. Usually I’ll start with good intentions, to make the code clean, and when I look at it, I realise the mess I’ve created. I say “clean up your code” with some trepidation, since your code doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be clean enough so that you can find everything you need. This may not sound like a problem at the moment, but later on in development you’ll want to find things, and clean code can really help that.
Another quick point is if you’ve made your site in a program like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, the code might be particularly messy. That’s why I’d suggest you code your sites from scratch, so you know where everything is from the start.
3. Get some content ready!
Unless you’re selling some sort of product, chances are you’re going to fuel your website on content, like some sort of virtual fuel pump. The problem is though, that just like the stuff you find at your local gas station, original content is quite valuable, and writing it yourself can take some time. That’s why I’d suggest you get some content ready before launching your website, so for at least a week or two you’ll have a constant flow of new material.
Updating your site regularly is always a good idea, but do make it regular. If you can only update twice a week, only update twice a week. You can build on this later on in the development.
Tips and Tricks
4. Make your site sociable
Adding social icons to your site is always good for exposure. Adding buttons so that your readers can easily submit your articles to Digg, Delicious or Stumble Upon will allow more people to see your work.
Need more?
5. Set up an RSS Feed and Twitter for your site
RSS Feeds have always been important, but with the explosion in Twitter usage, it’s a good idea to have a twitter profile set up for your site. This is all going towards increasing exposure of your website, by allowing your readers to keep track of what your doing, so that they don’t lose interest and never come back.
RSS Feeds are so easy to subscribe to, and will help your users so much if they want to keep up with you. Twitter does exactly the same thing, albeit it’s slightly more personal as you can keep your readers updated about yourself. Both are becoming more important on blogs, with people more concerned about keeping up with their favorite stuff.
6. Have a plan
I don’t mean some sort of complex business plan, but you should have a basic idea of how you’re going to increase exposure or get the word out about your site. This may be as simple as knowing you’re going to submit your site to a few blog networks, or post articles on bigger sites to increase exposure. Even finding out about ways to increase exposure, or learning a bit about SEO (search engine optimization) will help you greatly when your site has been going for a few weeks.
Useful Links
7. Make sure everything works properly
Double check that everything on your site is working as it should be. This includes themes, links and even proof reading your content is important (that is, if you followed step 3). I’d especially point out that checking your twitter and RSS Feed links work is of the up most importance. If a user can’t subscribe they may just leave (as explained in part 5), and every user counts. A day is a long time on the internet, and if links are down for that long, the user might go off your site like a lump of raw fish.
Unfortunately checking that all this works is mainly down to you, and no one can really help you unless they check over your code for you. It may seem like a big job, going through all that code to make sure it works, but in the end it’ll pay off.
8. Faviconize
A Favicon can be as simple as a logo, or a completely unrelated element. In the end though, the favicon helps the user quickly identify what your site is when looking at it in their bookmarks or on some websites. It’s easy to make a favicon, and you can even get free plugins for photoshop to save files in the .ico format.
Adding Favicons to your website once they’re created is as easy as adding this code to the head section of your document:
<link href="link/to/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" />
Some Favicon Inspiration
9. Get Analytics set up for everything
Analytics helps you keep track of what’s happening on your website. My personal favorite is Google Analytics. Not only is it free, but it also packs a lot of quality, allowing you to keep track of your users with its beautiful User Interface. Google Analytics isn’t the only good Analytical tool out there though, and I’d strongly recommend Mint if you’re willing to cash out for keeping track of your visitors.
Not only is it possible to keep track of all your lovely visitors, my friend, but now you can keep track of how many subscribers you have too! Feedburner allows you to find out loads of cool statistics about your subscribers, while also allowing you to optimize your feed as well.
Why is Analytics Important?
Well, Analytics helps you see how things are progressing. If your bounce rate starts rising, maybe you aren’t giving the reader what they want. If your subscriber count is going down, maybe it’s because what you’re doing isn’t up to scratch. I may add, at this point, that Feedburner Stats will vary from day to day, because it counts how many people view their feed reader with your feed in it, and they may not read it every day.
The important thing though, is that it lets you see what’s happening.
10. Add meta tags
Meta tags are key for search engine optimization. It lets the search engine know what your site is about with tags, descriptions and other stuff. Here’s an example of two meta tags:
<meta name="description" content="Webtint.net is your one stop for web related content" />
<meta name="keywords" content="some, tags, and, keywords, go, here" />
Search engines see this and they know you mean business, indexing your site above other similar sites that have similar content. This is great for you, giving you more search traffic! You might also want to check out “A SEO Strategy You Shouldn’t Ignore” on Tutorial9.net.
11. Accessibility (Bonus Point)
Make sure your website very accessible. If your user can’t reach the content they want to, then they probably wont visit again. This includes everything from getting to articles, to menus and all that jazz.
Some Links to help you
12. Set it up for expansion (Bonus Point)
This is a little less important than the other points, but it’s always a good idea to get your website ready for expansion. Set it up so that you can add to it easily if you wish to, such as a wide sidebar for adding loads of content, or a content area that lets you do whatever you want.
As I’ve said, this is the least important. You could probably redesign your site at some point to ready it for expansion later on in development when the need arises.
13. Check in every popular browser (Bonus Point)
Make sure your website looks like you want it to look in all the browsers that are popular, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. The main thing you should be worrying about is that your website is avaliable to the widest number of visitors, so having it working in all those browsers is of the upmost importance.
Checking your website in all these browsers can be a laborious task, but luckily there are a few programs to help you. My favourite at the moment is this lovely plugin from spoon.net, which you can find here. It allows you to check your website in all the most popular browsers, without having them necessarily installed on your computer.
14. Make sure it Validates (Bonus Point)
Validation is when your site has no errors on it, whether it be CSS or HTML. You can check out the HTML and CSS validators in the “Need even more?” section below. There are two main reasons why validation is useful when it comes down to website development:
- Validation Speeds up your site
- Validated Sites tend to be tidier.
Now point 2 can lead to a faster site, but it also helps you with finding code. You may be wondering why it speeds up your site, and that’s a pretty straight forward concept. If your HTML or CSS is invalid, your browser tries to fix it up for you. It does this by correcting all the errors it finds, and fixing them, so that it can then run the whole HTML document. This fixing takes time, and if there are enough errors, it slows down your website.
Now, each browser fixes these errors in its own way, meaning you end up with various versions of your site being run by various browsers. If you don’t fix these errors, a few generations of browsers down the line and your site might just not work right.
Need even more?
15. Optimize your URLS (Bonus Point)
That means changing the likes of /?action=article&id=1&comment-page=5&comment-id=15 to something like /article/1/5/15/. This is easier said than done. Luckily, Wordpress has a nice little feature that allows you to do this quickly and easily which you can find in the Settings section. If you’re using a custom made site or your CMS doesn’t have that option, you’re going to have to use some htaccess to change the urls.
Optimizing your URLs also means adding a forward slash to the end of directory urls, so changing http://www.webtint.net/directory to http://www.webtint.net/directory/
Why does this help?
Search Engines love directory style URLs, and prefers them over those sloppy PHP atrocities. This means that search engines will put those urls above the PHP style ones. This will allow you to get more hits from search engines, opening your website to a wider audience.
Oh and the forward slash at the end of directories? This merely comes down to speed. Adding a forward slash to the end of directory URLs lets the browser know that this is a directory, meaning it has less work to do.
Comments
nice article jonathon…
ur post helps me a lot…
keep it up..
Overall nice article, although I think some of the things you mention can be a little bit more specific (the validation part is very thin).
I would like to add that the SEO friendly URL’s you describe can be even better, by changing them into domain.com/categoryname/articlename/ in stead of using numeric URL’s.
For the rest good job, will check this site regularly now!
great post
big thanks