The Final Touches

The hard work is nearly over. After painstakingly designing and building your site, it's just about ready to be launched to an eagerly awaiting public (you hope).

Before you upload your site (we'll deal with webspace in the next part of Sitebuilder) there are some final checks you should run through. You might as well get it perfect now rather than later.

Testing

Firstly, make sure your site works. Check that you links and images work correctly and make sure that you've got your paths correct, although you may have done this as you went along.

Make sure everything is logical and easy to use - ask other people to scan over your site. They'll pick up things that you might never even think of and will also tell you about any spelling and grammar problems that you might have made.

Hopefully any changes that are needed will be simple as the larger problems should have been picked up when you made your mock-up page to test your page layout. If you didn't do that, you'll probably be starting to regret it at this stage.

Make Sure...

Check that all your content is where it should be - make sure you haven't missed any pages out, especially the bits and pieces like feedback forms and What's New pages. Also have a scan through you main pages again and check that what you wrote about your site right at the start still applies to the finished product.

Hey Presto!

After all your hard work, your site is finally finished! Get it uploaded to that server and start spreading the news amongst friends. Be careful not to send out a huge number of e-mails announcing your site as people will soon perceive it as junk mail. And stick to people you know - I do not condone spam!

Another good way of announcing your site is on newsgroups. See if there are any groups that deal with the topic of your site, or post a message to your ISP's "announce" newsgroup which allows users to give their sites a plug and receive feedback from others. But again, don't spam irrelevant newsgroups with messages.

The most obvious way to publicise your site is through the major search engines. I'll explain how to go about getting listed on these in the next section.

Maintenance

If possible, try to keep your site fresh by providing new content from time to time. This will keep people coming back time and again looking for new information. Maintain an up-to-date What's New page so that your visitors can quickly find the latest additions.

Finally, listen to feedback. Hopefully you will receive comments from some of your visitors with suggestions on how to improve buth the content and design. At first this may be disheartening as your hard work is seemingly savaged, but you'll be better off for it. Make any improvements you can and slowly the feedback should get more positive. Everyone starts somewhere, so don't expect it to be brilliant first time!