Annual Website Check-Up
Now that a new year is upon us it is a good time to perform an annual website check-up for every site you own or manage.
- Check your domain registration information:
Make sure that the names and contact information are correct for the registrant, billing, admin and technical contacts. Check the domain registration expiration dates. Check that your domain registrar has not changed. - Review the contact information on your website and update anything that has changed such as email addresses and people in various job roles. Make sure the right person is getting the feedback.
- Forms:
For each form on your site, fill in the appropriate information. Check the the confirmation page and make any updates that maybe needed. Review the results of the form submission and check for errors, aka database properly adding, updating or deleting the form results. Review and update the message used in any auto responders so they are not caught in spam filters and provide a useful response to your visitor. Run spell check to catch any errors that may have cropped up when editing. - While you are at it review your site’s privacy policy. Update it to reflect any changes in what data you collect and what you do with the data.
- Validate your links, either by checking manually, using a tool like Xenu’s Link Sleuth
- Review your server logs paying particular attention to your 404 reports to see what is being requested and not found.
- Test your site search function, if it isn’t working fix it, replace it or remove it.
- If you do not have a site map consider adding one, if you’ve used Xenu’s
Link Sleuth to check your links it will also create a site map for you making this step easy to do. - Validate your pages and stylesheets. While you are at it test it in as many browsers as you can put your hands on. Browser you should check with include Internet Explorer,
Firefox and
Opera on the PC and Safari, Firefox and Opera on the Mac. (If you don’t have a Mac or know someone who will let you use theirs you maybe able to find one at a public library, or rent one at Kinkos for an hour or so.) If you can test in Firefox or Safari you should be pretty safe with Linux browsers but you can test Linux browser using a boot from cd Linux operating system like
Knoppix Linux. - Check your site for Accessibility:
WAI full checklist - http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.html § 508 Checklist by WebAIM - http://www.webaim.org/standards/508/checklist reports WCAG Level 1 & 2 errors and provides an alt text quality report http://www.icdri.org/test_your_site_now.htm - Update your copyright information:
You can use JavaScript to make your copyright year correct with: 
<script language="JavaScript"> document.write(’Copyright xxx Corp: © 2002-’+(new Date()).getFullYear()); </script> Alternatively you can use tools like DWTs or Find & Replace in your web editor. You can use server side code if your pages have ASP, ASP.NET, PHP or some other server side language. Finally, if you use SSI (shtml) you can make it a server side include. - Review each page’s content. Update information where necessary and can be quickly done such as "We’ve been in business at the same location for 8 years" and flag pages that need a major overhaul.
- Check the password-protected parts of the site
are still protected, consider changing passwords on a regular basis. - Finally, check your keywords, meta tags and content for search engine friendliness.
- Want to see how many of your links Google has indexed? Use:
From the Google homepage put allinurl:webtechsig.org in the search box - See what sites are linked to yours with:
Google - the Google home page or toolbar type in allinurl: followed by the domain you want to check in the search box, example:
"+www.mvp.wiserways.+com"quotes and + are necessary Other methods to check can be found at Search Engine Watch -
Checking Your Listing In Search Engines