Media-Slave Web Hosting and Web Design / Photography Glasgow, Scotland

A quick checklist to make sure your website is ready for launch.

This is a very short but very usefull wee blog written by Stefan Mischook.

Original Article: http://www.killersites.com

This article was written more for web designers and how to build good sites, but I think the information is just as important for the client to know, hopefully understanding why certain decisions about a website are taken in the development process.

What are the ‘Universal Principles’ … and how do they apply to the business of web design?

It is quite common for clients not to see the latest updates on their website or changes in images or layout. In most cases this is due to your browser caching the page locally on your harddrive. This is a useful function of the browser because it loads a website off the harddrive to speed up the page loading. In some cases this plays havoc, especially in the IE browser. Refreshing the page should load the page from the server, but in our experience this does not happen as well as it should. Please see below the steps to clear your cache from your browser. All popular browsers are included.

Maybe this article should be in its own section, but I have decided to plant this under the SEO section. It seems appropriate since online there is very little difference between SEO and PR (as long as what the potential client finds via your SEO is also worth looking at :-) )

Even established brands are struggling through the recession, so what hope does a start-up have? Well, probably a new hope. It is all about working hard and smart. Remember that many big or established companies are currently cutting down on PR and advertising. Them taking the eye off the ball is probably just what the start-up, or any smaller company, needs to wangle his way in there.

A meta tag (or tag) tells the search engine what your site is about. The major search engines will review your site and read your meta tags to determine categories for your site. Meta tags tell the search engine your site's title, description and keywords. Without these tags, it's difficult for your site to achieve a high ranking on many major search engines.

The best way to determine your keywords is to step out of your shoes and imagine yourself as one of your customers or prospects. How do you think these people will search for sites like yours? What keywords do you think they will enter into the search engines?

Here are 11 quick tips for ensuring your content is usable

According to CWsites over at Mind Eye Web Design, 95% of web users do not read 80% of your content. With these statistics already working against you, how can you improve your content to ensure that readers are getting the best user experience from your site?

So, you can't afford to have someone do your search engine optimisation for you, but you need to get your pagerank higher. Usually this is done by good rated sites with the same basic content linking back to you. This is quite a difficult thing to do, especially nowadays where website owners do not want alot of links coming 'off' their website. There are a few ways of getting started.