Creating a Blog (Part II): Essential Blog Launch Checklist

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So, you have decided about the name, topic, hosting and blogging platform for your blog, as I suggested in my previous post, where I talked about where and how to begin creating a blog, and you made some initial posts.

Before you start spreading word about your new blog, I have one more tip for you. In this article I will list some important and necessary checks that blogs should be checked against before the launch.

7 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Blog

Cross Browser Compatibility – It’s important that your website works across browsers. It doesn’t have to be pixel perfect, but everything should work, and the user shouldn’t see any problems. Try it at least with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
Functionality – Test your blog as if you were the visitor. Make sure all forms work. For instance, if you have a contact form, send yourself an email. Try out the search form. Make sure navigation works. Another good idea is, to let your friend try out the blog.
Proofread – Read everything. Twice. Also, try to avoid long walls of text by breaking them into shorter paragraphs.
Links – Click all links on your blog. Make sure all external links in your posts work. Make sure your links stand out from normal text by giving them a different color or underline. And put your RSS feed link on a visible spot.
Sitemap – Create a sitemap.xml file in your root directory to allow search engines to easily index your blog. You can create sitemap file on XML-Sitemaps or, if you use Wordpress, install Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
Analytics – Installing some analytics tool is important to analyze how your new blog performs. Google Analytics is my favorite tool to do that.
Titles and Meta Data – I’ve written about titles in my previous post How to Use Titles Effectively on Blogs. While meta data isn’t as important as a good title for SEO, it’s still a good idea to use it. If you use Thesis theme for Wordpress, you can easily set meta data for every page and post separately.