16 things to check before launching a CMS based website (e.g. Drupal)

May 20, 2009 - Jordan Willms

It is always smart to sanity check a website before deploying it into a production environment. Whether this is a brand new website, or a upgrade to an existing website, there are a laundry list of things to check before proceeding. Humans are forgetful people. Checklists are not. That is why Work at Play created a "Before Launch Checklist" are part of our Process Library (which we'll slowly be publishing out over this blog as time goes by) Here is the checklist (which can also be downloaded in PDF above). This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Design

• If this is a website, does it have a custom favicon?
• Has the entire site been proof read? Who did it?
• Have you checked all the standard browsers? FF/IE/Safari/Chrome?
• Does the site still work with Javascript off? Who tested this?
• Are all pages W3C standards compliant? Who checked?
• Have all design assets been packaged for delivery to the client? (e.g. PSDs, FLAs, etc)

SEO Basics

• Are titles SEO friendly? Are meta title & description added?
• Does the client have an analytics package? Has the code been integrated?
• If the is an XML Sitemap, has the XML sitemap been submitted?
• Is the page's title in an H1 tag? (Not the site name!)

Drupal/CMS (if applicable)

• Make sure automated tasks are setup (i.e. cron or cron.php)
• Have development modules been deactivated removed from the production website?
• Is this an upgrade? Has the maintenance page been styled? Has the client been notified about the outage?
• Are on-screen error messages disabled?
• Are performance settings turned on? Caching? Compression?
• Is there a backup strategy for files & database?

This checklist is living document -- please let us know anything you believe we are missing and we'll improve the list.

Marketing Needs Design

May 04, 2009 - Jesse Korzan

I recently posted on Twitter something to the effect that "MarketingProfs.com makes me angry". Specifically, Matthew Grantʼs post “Design Needs Marketing, But Does Marketing NEED Design?” was the most recent pain point for me.