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?

It is a common knowledge that the Net grows and develops constantly. There are hundreds of websites launched every day, the competition grows and it’s harder and harder to make a visitor stay at a website. Make sure your website usability is good enough to bring comfort to your visitors so they stay at your website longer.

First of all avoid the inconsistent site-wide navigation. Navigation should stay the same throughout the website. Consider it an anchor that assures the user he won’t be lost. Make sure the navigation shows the list of locations to browse your website and the user’s current location.

Avoid registration required to view the site content. Hiding away valuable information won’t bring you more traffic, actually it’ll only frustrate the users and drive them away.

If you still need a registration make sure it isn’t too long. Don’t force your visitors to fill in looooooong forms, no one likes doing an extra job. So remove not necessary things from the form, the optional stuff can be filled out after the registration.

Make your texts easy to scan and read. No one will read a page of bold text, give your user something to focus on. Use pictures, paragraphs, large headlines so the user can easily find that specific thing he’s been looking for.

Make sure your site user can find your contacts if he feels a need to say he likes your website and appreciates your services. You do not have to give your phone number, a contact form will be okay.

All things mentioned above are important, but don’t forget the most essential for your success is the good and interesting content. Give your users what they need and they’ll appreciate your hard work.

What are other things to make a website more user-friendly you would suggest?