One of the most important steps in the pre-launch phase is an in-depth QA process, including usability and cross-browser testing.  But let’s assume that step has already been completed and your site is bug free and looks snazzy in all the major browsers.  Heck, let’s even say you’ve got a kick-ass mobile version and that everything degrades gracefully with javascript disabled, or on a horrible, outdated browser (I don’t think I need to name names here).

Aside from making sure everything works and looks good, here is a list of items to check on and implement (if you haven’t already).  Many of these may seem rather trivial compared to larger issues like site functionality, but the little details are important and you want to put your best face forward when presenting a new website to the world.  The lack of a favicon may not drive people away from your site, but those small details will be noticed and appreciated by users as well as peers in the industry.  Other items on the list can be much more crucial to the usability and success of the site.

Add Google Analytics and create goals and/or events

There’s nothing like having a great response to your newly launched site – only to realize you’ve forgotten to add analytics tracking code.  But beyond just adding the code so you can track your site’s traffic, it’s also helpful to set up events and goals within Google Analytics. Having goals will help you measure how successful your site is, beyond just the number of page views. For more information on goals, see this presentation, Goals in Google Analytics.

You may also want to set up some events so you can track specific actions that may not be measurable by page view counts and user paths.  On one site we launched recently we wanted to measure how many people were logging in using Facebook Connect, as opposed to logging in using the traditional method.  Creating Events let us track those actions and compare them. For more information on setting up events, see Google’s Event Tracking Guide.

Proof-read and check for straggler placeholder content (“lorem ipsum”, FPO images)

Typos and grammatically incorrect sentences are easy for a developer to miss when they are concentrating on making sure the site looks and functions properly in the week(s) before launch.  Hopefully misspellings and forgotten “Lorem Ipsum” text will be caught in QA, but they could be overlooked if the focus is on testing functionality.  Take another look through the site yourself, but more importantly, ask a friend to proof-read or ask your mom to see if there’s anything she doesn’t understand.  Getting new eyeballs on the site is always better than just looking at it yourself for the 5,278th time.

Check for hard-coded links containing your development URL

Sure, your links and assets may work NOW, but will they after you’ve pushed the site live and the development site is taken offline?  Even if you keep your dev site up and running, if you are still linking to JS and CSS files from your development site you’ll probably end up wondering why those edits you are making to the live versions aren’t having any effect.

The easiest way to avoid having development URLs on your live site is to not hard-code those links at all. If you are using WordPress there are several ways to have URLs generated dynamically:

• Use the constant TEMPLATEPATE for PHP includes
• Use get_permalink() to retrieve the permalink for a specific page
• For assets, use bloginfo(‘template_directory’) to get the URL for your theme folder. Then append the rest of the path to the CSS or javascript file

Check your SEO and robots.txt

Any optimization for search engines should be completed before the site is launched. Sometimes SEO might not feel “essential” for a site launch but you really want it to get the most momentum coming out of the gate so it’s best to have everything set up before launch.  Check your robots.txt file as well to make sure it is formatted properly. Mistakes in the robots.txt file could mean that certain directories are not indexed by search engines. For some common mistakes to avoid, see the article The importance of Robots.txt and scroll down to the section “Things to Avoid.”

Add an XML Sitemap

Generate an XML Sitemap of your finished site using a sitemap generator, or a WordPress plugin.  If you generate it yourself, place the XML file in the root directory of the site.  The sitemap will help search engines crawl your site and index your pages.

Test your site in YSlow and fix any obvious optimization issues

Hopefully you will have used YSlow or Google Pagespeed during the development process to spot problems early. But even if you have checked during active development, last minute changes or additions may have made a big impact so always check again.  Reduce your HTTP requests by combining CSS and javascript files and using sprites.  Minify and/or Gzip scripts to reduce their sizes.  Move assets to a Content Delivery Network if one is available (this is especially important if you have videos or large downloadable files).

Turn on caching

To ensure your site is “Digg-proof” (can handle a large spike in traffic, usually caused by being linked to from a site like Digg) site caching is essential. If you are using WordPress, here are a couple of great caching plugins: WP Super-Cache and W3 Total Cache.  Super Cache will save static HTML copies of your pages so that they will not need to be dynamically generated with PHP every time someone visits.  No need to worry about your dynamic content disappearing though – if you add a new blog post or if someone posts a comment, the static page in the cache will be recreated.  W3 Total Cache doesn’t go so far as to create a static version of your site, but it does do many other things that will increase the load speed of your site and lighten the load on the server.  Whichever method you use, enabling caching before launch will prevent unexpected downtime should a “Digg”-type event occur (and typically you will never predict when that might happen).

Make some security checks

Are any of your folder or file permissions set to 777?  Do you have an easy-to-guess password on the admin account for your CMS? Do any forms on the site submit data to a database without first being checked and filtered (to prevent SQL Injection Attacks)?

Add a favicon

The cherry on top of your website sundae. But beyond just looking all pretty up in the address bar of the browser, the favicon will also be displayed in certain situations if your site is bookmarked. Having a little icon to go with your site  helps it to be identified amongst the user’s other bookmarks.

and finally…

Give yourself some credit!

If appropriate and you’ve discussed it with your client, add a ‘website by…’ attribution and link into the footer of the site (or on a “credits” or “links” page).

See anything I missed or have something on your pre-launch list that I didn’t mention?  Leave it in the comments!

Oh, and happy new year!  Here’s to many successful site launches in 2010.