"Business development and Marketing"; ?>

Content—general

Check content spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Content—printing

Print important pages from a browser to ensure correct printed appearance.

Content—consistency

Check consistency of capitalisation, writing tense and style, recurring phrases, variations of the same expressions and in list endings.

Content—legal

Australia’s ASIC requires certain disclosures, such as the registered company details to be present on all company "documents".

Content—copyright (internal)

Ensure the presence of accurate footer copyright date and text.

Content—copyright (external)

Cite all external copyright and trademark products

Content—contact

Include email or telephone details at each footer and/or in the contact page.

Content— accessibility

Is there an easy provision for users to increase the text size?  (More information relating to accessible to people with disabilities can be found in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines v. 1.0.)  

Images—“alt” attribute

Create “alt” attribute text for each image.  This specifies alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed.  (Useful for image indexers such as Google’s and to address accessibility issues.)

Content—link functionality

Verify that all links work.  An automated tool is available at the Google Webmaster Tools Home page.  (Click the site you want, and under Diagnostics, click Crawl errors.)

Content—form functionality

Check that all forms work as intended and that they are not easily broken—such as by entering numerical values in text input fields.

Content—resolution

Does the page view correctly on a 1024×768 resolution screen? (Many developers have larger screens.)

Content—browsers

Check that your site appears reasonably consistent in different browsers such as Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3 and Chrome. (Note: IE and Firefox possess, between them, approximately 90% of the browser market.)

Content—keywords (SEO)

Check that language which can be captured by keyword searches has been used.  (The Google keyword tool is useful.)

Content—basic appearance

Test your site without Java, Flash, or other plug-ins enabled.

Content—favicon

Create the favicon.ico site icon, which is the icon that appears in the browsers’ tabs and in the bookmarked lists.

SEO optimisation

Improve the ranking of your site from queries in Google.  (Google’s SEO Starter Guide is a useful resource for both SEO and style.) 

Meta tags—title

Title meta tag text corresponds to the page name at the top of browser windows, on browser tabs, and are usually the title in search engine page results.  

(We like the Joomla CMS platform for our web development work, however, it’s meta tag functionality leaves a bit to be desired.  We have found the “Tag Meta” Joomla plugin and component to work really well.)

Meta tags—description

These usually form the “snippets” displayed in Google searches and are important for search engine results.    (Read more at Google.)

Navigation—hierarchy

Are the navigation categories and filenames in a human-friendly format? Is a naturally-flowing hierarchy used? (Read more at Google.)

Navigation—breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs, which are the text descriptions at the top or footer of pages, are very useful in helping users navigate through your site.

Navigation—XML Sitemap SEO

For SEO purposes, submit an XML Sitemap file through Google's Webmaster Tools.

Navigation—HTML sitemap

Create an HTML sitemap page, such as here.

Navigation—search

Enable users to easily search the site using an in-page search tool

Navigation—404

Create a dedicated "error 404" page to gracefully handle users who follow a broken link or type the wrong URL, such as here. (An added advantage is that—if you include a contact link on your 404 page—users will often let you know the instant a link is broken.)

Links—relative

Absolute internal links (as opposed to relative links) will fail when the site is transferred from your test location to the final domain location.

Links—anchor text

Associate anchor text with each internal and external link.

Validate XHTML code

Validate your XHTML code to check grammar, vocabulary  and syntax. A good validator is at http://validator.w3.org/

Validate CSS code

Validate your CSS code to check grammar, vocabulary  and syntax. A good validator is at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Security—file permissions

Set appropriate read/write permissions for files and directories

Security—.htaccess

Check that the .htaccess file disables directory listings for the inner folders

Security—robots.txt

Create a robots.txt file to prevent search engine access to parts of your site.

Use Nofollow’s

Your site's reputation can be adversely affected by the content from external links, or an internal blog with public comments.  Set the value of the "rel" attribute of such links to "nofollow".

Analysis—review search engine friendliness

Use these tools to provide you with details about your pages' visibility on search engines:
Google Web Master
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Tools

Analysis— traffic

Setup analytics to easily monitor user traffic patterns.  We like Google Analytics.

Analysis—optimisation

Use the Google Website Optimiser which allows you to run experiments to determine what on-page changes will produce the best conversion rates with visitors.

Server—Backup

Test your backup strategy by backing up and restoring both the files and the back-end database.

Server—general

Check the server disk space and capacity.

Server—errors

Setup email or SMS alerts in the event of errors or failures.

Geography matters to many consumers. Add your business to Google's Local Business Centre.

Marketing—social

If applicable to the business, create complimentary social sites on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

Marketing—search

Submit the site URL to the main search engines.

Marketing—advertising

Set-up Google Adwords where necessary

Marketing—advertising

Submit links to your blog, article or other media to a virtual publishing site such as Technorati.

Marketing—search engine results

Check the formatting of the meta tag descriptions in search engine results pages and tweak the meta tags’ texts as necessary.