3-Point Technical Checklist For Your Website

This post was made Jun 30, 2009 by Carlos del Rio

Yesterday Smashing Magazine put out a comprehensive list of check lists for the web. I like the concept but many of the lists offer vague and esoteric advice that requires more explanation to be used properly. I have grabbed three points from one of the articles that you can address today in a bout an hour using the tools and Firefox add-ons I mention below.

1.) Does the site load quickly – even for dialup users?

To load quickly even for the large number of users that don’t have broadband connections to the Internet you need to reduce your total design to as close to 100k as possible.

Run your site through a speed test – the one recommended here will break out each element in your site and let you see where you are overloading.
Run some optimization checks – Download Firebug & YSlow (as of 7/7/2009 Yslow is compatible with the newest version of Firefox)
Replace your old elements with optimized elements

I realize that many people are using blog software and javascripts that make it difficult to get all the way down to 100k, but try.

2.) Are all links (internal and external) valid and active?

For your internal links you can use Link Evaluator it will give you a green/red highlight for all links on a page, and lets you define what those color indicate. Alternately, you can use XML-Sitemaps.com to check, but they will charge you to disclose the exact errors. To capture all external links make sure you have proper 404 handling.

This functionality can be found in most web hosting control panels (like cPanel) or if you are using a .htaccess panel the handling would look like this:

ErrorDocument 404 /error.html

Just make sure you have error.html built out before you implement this.

3.) Are scripts free from errors?

Pay another visit to Firebug to visit the script tab to catalog any bloated scripts–now you are done.

So, you aren’t actually done, but you do have a list of things that can be sent to the appropriate parties or implemented later.

User Driven Change