When You First Launch Your Website

1. Bookmark your website. Now, re-open your browser and see if an icon other than the browser icon shows up before your URL. You can easily get your own custom favicon to load with your page. Also try to type in your website without the "www". If you get an error or server message, contact your hosting company to have this corrected. Many internet users will attempt to directly navigate to your website without the w's.

2. Have a family member, friend or associate check your homepage. It's best if it is someone who is not familiar with the Internet. Ask them if they know the focus of your web site. They should be able to point out the main focus of your homepage without difficulty. If they are confused as to what your site is about, you need to make some changes. Ask yourself "Is my message clear from the get-go?"

3. Make sure all of the links within your web site work properly, as well as links going outside your web site.

4. Make sure all tags are properly closed. Examples of this are the use of the paragraph tag < and the

tag. In XHTML all open tags must have a closing tag:

5. Check your image optimization and image links for problems, broken links, changes and updates, etc. Make sure you quote all attribute values within the document.

For example

is correctly coded while

is not.

6. Do you use PDF's on your site? If you do, be sure to evaluate three important factors:

* Do you provide a link to download Acrobat Reader?

* Do you denote your links as PDF's and show the user the file size?

* Do you provide links back to your web site from the PDF?

7. Lastly, remember you can always use the free validator tool to make sure your web page is compliant. You can find the W3C validator at http://validator.w3.org/ and simply putting in the URL of the page you want checked. It will verify whether the page you constructed is XHTML compliant.

The easier and clearer things are on your website, the more people will use your site and the more often they will return.