A Checklist For Your Wesbite

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Date: 14th Aug 2005
Author: Webmaster
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Ranking: 7.25 (8 Votes)

Websites are meant to be accessible, usable, user friendly, easily navigable, fast loading and search engine friendly. Designers and developers often busy in achieving the basic goals of design code miss many important and rather trivial things. I have been personally missing on things for quite a long time. Finding and editing common mistakes at a later stage can be hectic but it is still worth going through a checklist before committing any sins. I hope this list will serve a good purpose.

• Make sure you have defined the correct document type declaration or DOCTYPE for your pages. Refer to the W3C Recommended DOCTYPES for details.
• Make sure you have at least got the basic META tags including content-type, keywords, description and robots.
• Write descriptive page titles for your web pages.
• Avoid using query strings in URLs. Refer to the Search Engine Friendly URLs on Sitepoint.
• Avoid using any splash pages to start with.
• Make your Logo clickable and pointing to homepage from the rest of the pages.
• Validate your markup and CSS at W3C's validation.
• Make sure your pages do not take more than 7 seconds to load. Keep your pages size below 60K.
• Don't be Flash or Javascript dependant. Provide alternative ways to display content for the users whose browsers are not supporting them.
• Make sure you have provided appropriate alt tags for all images (decorative and descriptive) on your website.
• Test your site on multiple browsers and make sure your website is not browser specific and looks reasonably good on all major browsers.
• Make the purpose of your website very clear right on the homepage. Tell your visitors who you are and what you do.
• Provide an easy to use and user friendly navigation and maintain a consistency in navigation throughout the website.
• Keep the presentation separate from the layout by proper use of CSS.
• Avoid using images for text.
• Test your site for broken links and make sure you handle the 404 (page not found) properly.
• Use paging for lengthy content.
• Say no to pop-ups and frames.
• Make sure your user is no more than 3-4 clicks away from what he is looking for at any stage.
• Sort things in the natural order.
• Use pleasant colors and acceptable contrasts according to your website.

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