Make Certain Your Website Works

Even after you have a successful website design, your work does not end. You need to ensure that the website actually works and that it keeps working over time.

 

Test your links

Make sure your website works. Load your site in a browser from the Internet (not from your hard disk), make sure all the images appear correctly and click on all the links. This may seem obvious, but many people do not try their website before they publish it. If you are using a link checker that is built in to your web editor and your site is framed, then you cannot depend on the link checker, because it cannot check for framing problems, for example pages load into wrong frames, clicking a link results in frames within a frame, etc. You will need to check these manually yourself.

 

Remove dead external links periodically

If you link to any external sites, some of those links will almost certainly stop working at some point as the sites move or become extinct. Do not waste your visitors' time by forcing them to follow broken links. Check your links at least once every few months. You can use software to automatically check your links to external sites to see if any of them have gone dead.

 

Include a "Last Modified" date on the top or bottom of your pages

If your website contains information that could become outdated, then do your visitors the courtesy of letting them know when the information they are reading was written. That way, visitors do not have to worry about whether the information was written last week or five years ago.

 

If your content by its very nature cannot become outdated, for example poetry, stories, art, website design tips, then a date is not absolutely essential. However, readers may still appreciate knowing when a page was written anyway.