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Quick Starter Guide for a Web Startup

August 12th, 2009 Leave a comment Go to comments

Disclaimer : The list is not complete. I am just noting down what i have learned by running Bikes4Sale.in . Correct me if i am wrong.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

  • Give unique and meaningful title to each page.
  • Give unique and meaningful meta description to each page.
  • Give different meta keywords in different pages.
  • Each page should have proper heading tags – H1, H2 , H3 etc
  • Give alt and title texts for all images.
  • Title for links can be used as a tooltip in some browsers.
  • Redirect http://example.com/ to http://www.example.com/ (or vice versa) to avoid content duplication. Google and other websites may consider http://example.com/ and http://www.example.com/ as two different websites.
  • Redirect all unused subdomains to www.example.com. Eg: redirect http://sdsdsfsdgfsfsdf.example.com to http://www.example.com
  • Let the home page link be just a “/”.  No need to add index.html or index.php to the home page link. All links to home page should be http://www.example.com/ and not http://www.example.com/index.php
  • The best way to get free traffic to your site is to create a blog and update regularly.
  • Add your site, sitemaps and rss feeds to the following webservices.
  • If your site has an rss feed, give a link to the feed in the <head> section of all pages.
  • Some say that adding a Google Custom Search to your site may help in fast indexing of your webpages.
  • Register the domain for a long period
  • Its widely believed that the easiest way to get indexed by Google is to use Google Analytics
  • Tool for grading your website – WebsiteGrader.com

Usability

  • Make your logo a link to your home page. Users have a tendency to click on the logo to reach home page
  • Do not ask for First Name, Middle Name and Last Name. Ask for just Name.
  • If your site requires login, make the Login link visible and easily accessible. Research shows that login and signup links are the most common words which a user looks for when he reaches the page.
  • If your site requires login, give the email as the username. (or make it like username or email). No one is going to remember all the user names in different websites.
  • Keep your forms as simple as possible.
  • Ask minimum questions in forms
  • Mention whether a field in a form is optional or not.
  • Use JavaScript validation for forms
  • Follow the KISS Principle

Performance

  • Minify and Compress js files
  • Minify and Compress css files
  • Optimize images.
  • Keep your favicon at the root directory. Most browsers check for a favicon at the root of the site. So you can avoid one File Not Found error.
  • Try Google Page Speed
  • Try Yahoo YSlow and Yahoo Performance Rules

Analytics and Monitoring

Development Best Practices

  • Write only standards compliant html and css
  • First write standards compliant html and css  and then add specific hacks for IE6 (and not vice versa)
  • Keep the style part separate from HTML structure. Move all the styling to css. Keep the html structure clean.

Advertising

Domain Registration

Hosting Providers

Blogging  Softwares

CMS (Content Management Systems)

Forum Softwares

JavaScript Frameworks

Payment Gateways

Resources

  1. Cherian
    August 13th, 2009 at 02:50 | #1
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    Good writeup thoma!!!

  2. Sajay
    August 13th, 2009 at 06:39 | #2
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    I liked this one…

  3. sudhakar babu
    August 13th, 2009 at 09:44 | #3
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    Nice work thoma !! very informative …

    thanks ..

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