By (author unknown), Chris Hope's LAMP Blog – November 17, 2010 at 11:00AM
Karol K posted “things you should do immediately after launching a website” over at Six Revisions a few days ago and I thought it a useful post to share and add a few additional ideas to. I decided to wait a few days so I could have a read through people’s comments as well before sharing here.
After launching the website?
The first comment that needs to be made about the reasonably comprehensive list is that where possible you should have these things set up before the site is launched, all ready to go. Some of them can’t be done until after so do what you can beforehand and the rest immediately.
The list
This is just a summary of the main headlines with my comments added in some cases. Click through to the full article to read all the details for each point.
1. Create a sitemap.xml file and a robots.txt file
Definately have these ready beforehand. Even if it’s a blank robots.txt file. If your site’s database driven you want the sitemap file to be database driven and code should have already been written for it. I personally always use SilverStripe now and, while it has it’s own sitemap module, I have my own customised version which I use for all sites. It works from the get go.
2. Set up web analytics
3. Set up google webmaster tools
4. Monitor your search engine rankings
5. Submit your website to Dmoz
I didn’t realise that Dmoz was relevent any more (and in case always had difficulty submitting to Dmoz back in the day when I used to try). Karol does believe that “submitting to Dmoz does matter. The directory is manually reviewed so Google knows that only good, quality sites pass the exam.” So maybe it is important after all.
6. Set up Google Alerts to monitor mentions
7. Monitor your website’s uptime
Karol mentions Uptime Robot. I personally use Pingdom. There are many other monitoring services out there. If you’re running on your own servers you probably already have monitoring in place so may not need to necessarily do this one.
8. Check your site’s speed
Additional Items
Some additional items that could be on the list are:
9. Set up social/networking accounts
For example with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc where relevent. And make sure you link from those accounts to your new website. Yes that’s obvious 🙂
10. Submit to other directories
There can be some niche directories that are specific to your particular market that can be useful to be listed in. Seek them out and get listed. Some cost money. Some are free. Just make sure you get some worth from it.
11. Set up redirects
If you are re-launching a website and the URL structure has changed, set up appropriate permanent redirects and friendly 404 pages for the old pages.
12. Create a favicon file
This one should have been done in the design to HTML template phase of the website set up, but it’s a good thing to double check that it’s been done just before going live.
13. Check for 404s
For the days following the go live, check you access logs or error logs for 404 file not found for pages, images etc to make sure you haven’t linked to anything that doesn’t exist.
Read the post
Well that’s all from me. Now go and read the post “things you should do immediately after launching a website” over at Six Revisions.
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