7 Website Checks For Website Owners

Many small business website owners fall into the trap of getting a website designed and uploaded to the web and think that the job is done. The reality is that it is just the start.

There are several things that need to be considered to ensure that the site functions well and does what you intended. Here a 7 things you need to consider.

Email Addresses

Are you using the email addresses that come with your domain name? Many website owners continue to use a Gmail or Yahoo email address as the main contact address and not their own email addresses that can be configured as part of the domain name.

These addresses need to be configured on the email server and then you need to configure your email client to access them. If your Web host supports IMAP4 mailboxes then use these as the preferred access method and not POP3

Contact Forms and Contact Details

• Is your contact information (telephone, fax, mobile, email) clearly displayed and/or accessible.
• Have you taken care to hide your email address from email harvesting software?
• Have you tested your contact forms.

Tracking and Monitoring

It is important that you are aware your Visitors. How they found you site and what they did on your site and to do that you need to install tracking code on each page. Google analytics is by far the most popular and is free. You should also enable Google webmaster tools which provides useful insights into your site and how Google sees it.

Optimisation

Have you optimised your web pages. Most importantly have you optimised your home page. In particular:

• Title meta tag
• Description meta tag
• Opening Headline
• Page Content

Search Engine Submission

Have you submitted your site to the search engines? You only need to do this for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Forget the adverts offering to submit you site to hundreds on search engines!

The best and most efficient way of doing this is by getting an incoming link, and the easiest one to get is from a directory.

If your site is local have you added it to the local directories. All three major search engines have local listings.

Navigation

Have you tested your website navigation to make sure that it works? Is it consistent across the site. Are all pages within 2 hops from the home page? If your site is large (>25 pages) you should have a sitemap.

Web Design

Does your site look clean and professional. Is the text clear and readable? Make sure you aren't using clashing colours- black text on white background is popular for a very good reason.

Make sure you haven't overdone the graphics. Make sure the page loads within 5 seconds and check it in Internet Explorer (6 and 7), and Firefox.

If you pay attention to the above then  you should be on your way to having a successful website.