The Final Touches

The hard work is nearly over. After designing and building your site, it's just about ready to be launched to an eagerly awaiting audience.

Before you upload your site (we'll deal with web space in the next part of Sitebuilder) there are some final checks you should run through.

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. Don't forget to test your site on different browsers in case they display things differently to you imagine.

Make sure everything is logical and easy to use - ask other people to look over your site. They will normally pick up things that you might never even think about 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 initial test page to test your layout.

Check that all your content is where it should be - make sure you haven't missed any pages out. Also have a look through your main pages again and check that what you wrote about your site right at the start still applies to the finished product. After all it was probably a while since you started the project.

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.

Another good way of announcing your site is on newsgroups. See if there are any groups that deal with the topic of your site.

The most obvious way to publicise your site is through the major search engines. We will deal with 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.

Finally, listen to feedback. Hopefully you will receive comments from some of your visitors with suggestions on how to improve both the content and design.

If you want to look in the resources section for web log software and links as these help keep your site fresh with minimal effort.