There is a long road before bringing a website to the world, but actually launching it is the biggest joy you can imagine. When everything is done, all the pages are made and content is written and it seems like the work is over and you can make your website living, take a time and check few things out. These are things that are frequently forgotten but can affect your initial success.
Links
Make sure all the links in your pages work fine and lead to the correct destinations. Don’t just assume that all the links are working, actually click them.
Spelling
Make sure all the text is written without grammatical errors. Read everything once again yourself and ask someone to read it for you. Poorly written text makes a bad impression, so make sure your users won’t be disappointed.
Cross-Browser Check
Your website may look good in your preferable browser and be a complete disorder in some other browsers or other versions of the one you use. So go and make cross-browser check for your beautiful page. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same at every browser, but everything has to be working and the used has to be sure there are no problems. The most popular browsers are Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Chrome and Opera.
Titles And Meta Data
Page titles are the most important element for SEO, besides the users have to somehow know what the page is exactly. So make sure your page titles are unique for every page and are related to the page content.
Meta description and keyword tags are also important elements for SEO, though for the majority of search engines not that much as titles are. Anyway they may be helpful, thus make a description for every page at your website. Google users will love you for that. 
Functionality
Check everything carefully. Contact forms, search functions, shopping baskets and log-in areas are to be checked twice if not thrice. Ask people to do the testing after you did it yourself.
RSS Link
If you have a blog or newsreel at your website make sure you have an RSS feed and that users can find it easily.
Valid Markup
Make sure that all XHTML and CSS used in your website actually adhere to the web standards. Websites with valid markup tend to outrank websites with the invalid one.
Well, that’s it, now your website is all ready so go and launch it finally!
Do you have more items to be checked before you launch a website?
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One of the biggest points I agree with is the spelling. All too often, web designers will have a typo or two and it really reflects poorly upon the site owner.
Until Dreamweaver gets rerleased with a spell checker, make sure you look everything over at least 2 or 3 times.