Designing, building, testing and launching.

Phew, the website is up and running, it’s a hard job, especially getting all the content together, the text, images, testimonials, video.

But really, that’s only half the job.

So much more needs to happen when the website is launched and afterwards, things we include as standard to give your website the best possible chance of success in this digital world!

First of all, support…

It’s really important to me that our customers know we’re here for them, that they can pick up the phone, or drop us an email and not get a bill.

We provide free support, if our customers forget how to use the Content Management System (CMS), such as WordPress, or if they get a new phone and need help setting up email, or they just can’t get that image where they want it. We’re here to help, for free.

Things that should be done when a website is being launched…

We call this our pre-live checklist and is a double check procedure. These happen when a website is about to be launched and straight afterwards.

  1. Run Google Mobile text and Google Lighthouse Audit for Speed, SEO, Accessibility
  2. Check all code and settings to ensure the correct contact details, email addresses and API keys are in place
  3. Ensure all plugins, if WordPress, are up to date for security
  4. Test all pages on a desktop computer, laptop, tablet and mobile phone.
  5. Test all pages on a PC and Mac
  6. Test all pages on Microsoft Edge (IE), Firefox, Chrome, Safari
  7. Check all content is in place on all pages, ensure all watermarked images have been licenced correctly
  8. Check content is optimised for SEO (Google & Bing)
  9. Check fonts and favicon are functioning
  10. Test for W3C compliance
  11. Check for Accessibility compliance
  12. Check for GDPR and Cookies compliance
  13. Turn on SSL by default with full https://www. redirection
  14. Ensure developer debugging is turned off
  15. Test all forms, such as contact, checkout.
  16. Clear down all test data
  17. Take full launch backup
  18. Clear down old log files, cache files
  19. check robots.txt, htaccess and compression is in place, generate sitemap
  20. Setup google Analytics, Search Console
  21. Setup backups and alerts for security updates to be applied weekly
  22. Check SPF records are in place
  23. Run (again) Google Mobile text and Google Lighthouse Audit for Speed, SEO, Accessibility

There’s a lot more to creating a website than just making it look nice, there’s a lot behind the scenes to ensure its running well for the Search Engines (like Google and Bing) and users on all different devices, nice and fast, and secure.

A common problem we see is a WordPress built website, with lots of plugins, chugging along slowly without the SSL certificate in place and without a nice neat www. URL. Little things that we know through years of experience, that if they’re done properly at launch, make the difference further down the line.

Things that the end user probably won’t notice, the customer doesn’t know need doing, but are important when doing the job right.