A Site Launch Checklist

81 points by bmcleod 14 years ago | 18 comments

rglover 14 years ago |

Always interesting to see how others approach a launch. This got me thinking, though. Would it be useful/fun to crowd source launch checklists? Maybe something where people could submit their list and then everyone votes items up/down. I think it'd be cool to have a definitive list that was voted on by hackers everywhere. Sort of a faux industry standard checklist.

pontifier 14 years ago | |

This is the basic premise behind a site I made a few months ago. a checklist wiki where you can find a checklist that will probably include things you hadn't thought of. It is up at todowiki.com. There are very few things there right now, and wiki-spam is rampant, but I'm trying.

jpulgarin 14 years ago |

MPiccinato 14 years ago |

Anyone ever checkout LaunchList? http://launchlist.net/

Seems like it would be a great tool to keep track of these things.

keeran 14 years ago |

Another check list posted a while back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485553)

http://www.boxuk.com/blog/the-ultimate-website-launch-checkl...

MartinCron 14 years ago |

Pages have Appropriate Meta Tags.

Serious question. Does this have any impact anymore?

MrHobbes 14 years ago | |

To answer you question directly, yes.

In a nutshell,

* The keywords meta tag is no longer used.

* The robots meta tag is extremely useful.

* The description tag may be used to display along with a page's title.

* Neither description nor keywords meta tag have much impact for SEO.

Personally, I don't use the keyword meta tag and I may or may not use the description meta tag.

Somewhere out there, there is a search engine that still uses keyword tags for something significant, but I doubt that search engine is Bing (which now powers itself and US/Canada Yahoo).

References:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-do...

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-search-no-longer-uses-meta...

MartinCron 14 years ago | | |

Thank you for the informed reply. I appreciate it.

aw3c2 14 years ago | |

Yes. Google will (sometimes?) display what you put into <meta name="description" content="here" /> as abstract on the search results page. This makes it very easy to optimise what people see on there instead of making Google guess what to show.

vaksel 14 years ago |

it also helps to do some basic SEO before you launch...you need to rank for your own name so you don't lose out on word of mouth.

chetan51 14 years ago | |

How would you go about doing that?

dfc 14 years ago |

"Penetration testing if necessary."

If necessary? Seriously? You are trying to tell me that you are not convinced that someone who should do all of the other steps listed might not need to worry about security?

bmcleod 14 years ago | |

The level of security knowledge required to do decent penetration testing is a relatively rare skill and therefore often necessitates bringing in a third party which can skew the cost/benefit quite badly.

You're often much better off saying that your site has a certain level of security because it's built in default thing X until it grows a bit.

Generally you'll know already if you're in a market or field where penetration testing is absolutely necessary(finance, health, well known brands etc) and it won't be a question.

boyter 14 years ago | |

If you just have a sales website its probably not high on your list of priorities no. Same with anything that doesn't collect data (IE presentation only) or an expensive paid for service with a long sales cycle.

In all of the above cases I would consider security while creating, but I wouldn't do a lengthy pen test while trying to get the product out there. Of course that's also dependent on your target audience.

dfc 14 years ago | | |

You are your brand. If your homepage gets turned into a billboard for goat.cx you are owned in more ways than one...

There is really no point in us discussing this further. We have dramatically different assumptions on the importance of security and the value of a company's image/reputation.

hussong 14 years ago | |

To put things in perspective, think of the following typical situation: Website relaunch for a small company, total budget is $4000, cheapest quote you got for penetration testing is $300. Good luck selling that as a line item to a client whose email password is "123456".

dfc 14 years ago | | |

Thank you for the clarification. From the discussion of deployment, development and marketing teams and the TV promo I thought it was aimed at a different demographic.