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Web Site Check List

Standards are important because they lead to consistency. This is not only true for programming and communications but is also true for the publishing of web pages. It doesn't matter if it's for a corporate web site or your own personal site: there should be a consistent process in place to minimize the probability of publishing web pages that contain errors.

In the course of creating web pages, I have come up with my own personal check list of tasks to perform on every web page prior to uploading it to my web site. The standard practice that I have developed is to create this checklist in a spreadsheet with one row for each file to be published and one column for each task to be performed.

These checks are all directly related to a web page's unique content. I do not have to check page layout or site navigation because I use a standard page template for all web pages on the site.

Following is the list of tasks that I perform on every web page prior to uploading it to my web site:

• Spell check the web page.
• Proof read the web page to insure correct grammar and punctuation.
• Make sure the TITLE tag has the correct page title.
• Make sure the meta tag description is correct.
• Make sure the meta tag keywords is correct.
• Make sure the page appears correctly on the appropriate section index web page.
• Make sure the page appears correctly in the site map web page.
• Test the links (section index and site map page) to the web page.
• Validate the page html using the W3C Markup Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org/ to identify coding errors.
• Validate any changes/updates made to the site's CSS file using the W3C CSS Validation Service at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/.
• If the page contains outbound links, validate that they work.
• One more time: proof read the web page to insure correct grammar and punctuation.

As grammar and punctuation are my weak points, I go through this process twice.

Establishing and adhering to a web page check list doesn't guarantee that you won't make mistakes, but it will minimize the probability that your web pages will get published with errors.

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