Show HN: Website launch checklist

1. Gather beta tester feedback to confirm that site works.

2. Ask beta testers if they would like to be quoted in press release

3. Ask beta testers if they would announce the site to their network

4. Set up social media accounts related to site.

5. Gather media email addresses (reviewers, bloggers, news sites, etc..)

6. Email media a press release notifying the app has launched

(If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?)

This is a very simple list for simple sites.

More serious sites will have a much longer list.

Test all supported browsers.

Test with devices: iPhone, iPad, serveral Android phones (Androd 2.3, 4.1...), Windows Phone

Test with several screen widths (responsive design)

Test with ad blocker / Ghostery

Test for SEO

Test title of every page

Test internationalization

Test accessiblity (good contrast, no small print etc.)

Test with reader software

Test alt attributes

Test low bandwidth

Test with keyboard only

Test with high load (many requests per sec)

Test caching headers

Test minification and merging CSS / JavaScript files

Test compression of textual files

Test favicon and touch icon

Test charset

Test lang attributes

Test HTML5 form features on devices

Test offline (when connection gets lots in train for example)

Test image and description when the site is added in a Facebook message

Etc. etc.

There is a shorter version. 1) Launch anything. 2) Fix only things that your client wants to be fixed. 3) Profit

Try your site whilst using an ad-blocker.

Try your site throttled to 56KBit/s or at least 1MBit/s.

Have a 2$ server with a static HTML page around as emergency alternative if your main server melts.

I'm also pretty keen on the Web Developer Checklist - http://webdevchecklist.com/

It's confusing that "Checklist" (where you check items off) and "Discover" (where you find explanation about each item) and "To Do" (where you can add your own items) are three separate pieces. It would be much more elegant to have them combined into one simple list / app.

An aside: If you click on the airplane on Mac, the window goes full-screen. (Not what I expected, either, but surprising.) I didn't know you could implement that on a site, but apparently there's newer HTML5 API for requestFullscreen()

As you see by the amount of feedbacks here, this list will get unmanageably long in no time. I think you should categorize the items in checklist ("Mobile", "SEO", "Testing", "Server", etc) and add the ability to fold/collapse a category in order to see the items belonging to that certain category.

Great great feedback everyone, thank you. Will add more to the list over time.

Also been suggested over on Product Hunt to have a countdown launch timer. This is great motivation to launch a site too: http://www.producthunt.com/posts/departure

Nice! This is a great resource to reference. Up until this point I've been using a checklist I created with specific lines of code I can copy paste off of this gist: https://gist.github.com/Kortaggio/5156687

I have a checklist with a Trello version too so items can be checked off or easily removed (or new ones added): http://www.fduran.com/blog/web-site-launch-checklist/

I'm confused. Are you promoting the web app behind this list, or the contents of the list itself?

This is great. Did they miss anything? I'm about to launch a site.

Test contact forms, messaging, captchas.

Most important thing missing: test site with javascript switched off.