Linda Moran's web developer checklist

Note: This is not a complete list. When you go food shopping, do you write on your shopping list everything you need to buy, including milk and eggs? I don't, because I know I need those things. Instead, my shopping list consists of a checklist of just about everything else. Also I write down items that prompt me to remember other items not present on the list.

This master checklist serves as a guide for me to supplement the massive amount of information in my head. I use this as a general checklist, and as a vehicle for talking to my customers and potential customers. You should get a sense from this list of the kinds of decisions behind the building of a web site.

In actuality, each of these items consists of trigger words that could generate paragraphs, pages, or even entire chapters of discussion. Sometimes even complete books. Naturally, I'm not about to write it all down here.

Consultation and planning

woman at desk

Flesh out what my customer wants from their web site, what their visitors want, and what I know needs to be done. Look under the hood to see how the current site works if they have one. Here are some considerations for the work to be done (in no particular order):

  1. Do they want or have their own domain?
  2. Page of links
  3. Site map
  4. Update metatags for search (title and description)
  5. Footer
  6. Graphics
  7. Navbar
  8. Site Search. Do they already have it? Do they want it? Free search with a limit of 750 pages.
  9. Inbound link analysis and redirects. Discuss changes of page names.
  10. Anchor text
  11. Directory inclusion (Discuss Yahoo and DMOZ)
  12. Search landing pages
  13. Informational pages
  14. Identify keywords
  15. Rip out any frames or destructive javascript
  16. Disallow open new window and resizing of windows
  17. Links from me
  18. Webmaster page
  19. Count pages. My work takes a half hour to an hour per page
  20. Style sheets
  21. Alt text on image tags for the visually impaired
  22. Overall design and usability
  23. Forms processing (find out if their server allows scripts)
  24. Run Xenu to assess number of broken links, make a plan for link research
  25. Plan for site owner to do updates if desired
  26. Which type of home page? The most common home page design strategies are: menu home pages, news-oriented home pages, and splash screens.
  27. Do they want a page of "resources," which would be links to other sites?
  28. What is their plan for a link campaign? Reciprocal links?
  29. Do they need a FAQ page, which they can update themselves?
  30. How much updating do they want to do? Do they have FTP access?

Design and Development

In addition to the work that's already been listed:

  1. Put in a robots directive at the top of the webmaster page with noindex, nofollow
  2. Build a robots.txt file to exclude /oldsite and /webmaster
  3. Find all current inbound links so that later the site owner can alert them that the page names have changed
  4. Build an htaccess file for redirects. Consider need for redirect to the home page if the filetype has changed (to comply with existing bookmarks)
  5. Redirect all pages with changed names to accomodate 1. inbound links and 2. boomarks and 3. google search until re-crawl
  6. If the site has search, configure search to disallow "staging" and "oldsite"
  7. Title for each page which makes sense as a bookmark
  8. Footer for each page
  9. Every page should link to every other page
  10. Design each page to be a freestanding page (which the visitor may read in isolation)
  11. Add a javascript function to each page that automates date updates to the page
  12. Make sure all pages link to the home page
  13. Users prefer menus that provide at least five to seven links and very dense screens of choices as opposed to many layers of simplified menus
  14. Consider using the anchor text "web manager" rather than "webmaster"
  15. All images should have ALT text
  16. Use Bobby Worldwide to test for accessibility (http://webxact.watchfire.com/)
  17. Site search engine location should be upper right or upper left corner
  18. The navbar is a table of contents
  19. Full address and phone number in the about us or contact us page
  20. Actionable items possibly on the right nav

Testing before promote

  1. Look over old site to make sure no pages are missing from the new site
  2. Test in Firefox or Netscape plus IE
  3. Run Xenu
  4. If possible, get a live customer to test, not the business owner

Promoting to production

  1. Create an "oldsite" foler on the server
  2. Copy staging from hard drive to another dated folder on hard drive called something like 02-20-Production.
  3. In the production copy on the hard driver, remove "staging" in all pages on hard drive (change /staging/ to /)
  4. Download their old site, including all subfolders.
  5. Upload the old site again, but to the oldsite folder
  6. Delete the entire old site from main directory
  7. Upload the new site from the production copy, except for the htaccess file
  8. Spot-check new site
  9. Promote the htaccess file
  10. Test all redirects
  11. If there's a search engine, do an immediate crawl; be sure to clear the cache when doing so
  12. Leave the staging folder on the server for further updates
  13. Leave oldsite on the server

Testing after promote

  1. Run Xenu again
  2. Spot-check pages in Mozilla and IE
  3. Test redirects
  4. If they have a search engine, test search, check for disallows to make sure they're working

After promote and test

  1. Schedule a search crawl as needed
  2. Link campaign if contracted
  3. Link from my own sites as appropriate
Direct all technical questions and comments about this site to webmaster

Last Modified: Saturday, 12-Jan-2008 21:49:22 PST Linda Moran
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Copyright © 2005 Linda Moran

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