Gabriel de Kadt

Building websites – an outline [in progress]

• Build it

  • Live dev server?
    • robots.txt User-agent: * Disallow: /
    • Disable Analytics code… un-include it baby – or – set your analytics cookies
  • GIT. Version control/revision management/help in dark times
  • 404s – custom pages that notify of errors – a better 404
  • Use the force; htaccess: canonical urls and other tips and tricks
  • robots.txt / robots meta tag
  • Set up a maintenance page.
  • Version-number CSS and images (!important). Use htaccess to rewrite CSS file to eg style.css on the server. Updated images and CSS sheets may not be pulled from the server if they have the same name as the old one sitting in your visitor’s browser cache. Easiest solution; add a fake query to the end of the filename: ie style.css becomes style.css?v-102.
  • SEO (minimal basics)
    • Unique Page Titles
    • Relevant Title tags in the body copy
    • Unique Page Meta descriptions (for a Google snippet worth having – check your search results)
    • Alt tags to images

• Optimise it

  Good for your useres and now also your rankings (Google now clearly stating that optimised sites will rank higher.)

  • Compress, minify and concatenate JS and CSS
  • Combine  background images into sprites
  • USe your htaccess file to leverage server side compression on the fly
  • Cache it. For WordPress – nothing beats WP Super Cache

• Work it baby (in a big G stylee)

  • Google’s Webmaster Tools
  • analytics – Google’s (of course?). Don’t forget to exclude your own activities from the analytics
  • Keep in touch of what’s being said with Google Alerts