PHP: Things to Remember While Developing a Website

These days website is an essential marketing platform for your business and key part of your marketing mix. If you are planning to have one for your own business then you can hire any web developer or you can do it on your own.

Developing a website is not the hard part, hard part is, it must serve the purpose for which you have created it. If you are able to answer the following questions then you get the winning website. Otherwise follow the blog, it will take you through the steps you may have missed during your website development.

Is your website serving the purpose you have created it for?

Is sufficient traffic coming to your website?

Does your website has any errors?

How is it performing on web?

So here are few things which you always keep in mind when developing a website:

1. Code website keeping in mind SEO: It will help your site to boost in search ranking when you make it live. For more details about SEO practices.

2. Register your Website with Google Analytics and webmaster tools: Google analytics and webmaster tools will help you to keep track of your website. Using these tools you can see daily hits of your website, categories hits based on many other filters such as city, browser etc. These tools will also tell you the words for which your website is coming in search, search rank of website and how you can improve your website search rank. The best part of these tools is that they are free:) (upto limit).

3. Don’t forget to include customized 404 error page: This is often overlooked and underestimated. However, designed carefully, these pages can make a random visitor stay on your website, take a look around and eventually find the information he or she was looking for in the first place. Effective 404 error pages communicate why a particular page couldn’t be displayed and what users can do next. A search box and list of useful resources (possibly related to the missing page) could be helpful in this case. So go and designed one for your website.

4. Create robot.txt for your website : robot.txt is a text file, which must be present in your website folder. It prevents crawlers accessing all parts(URLS) of your website and you can tell crawler about your sitemap.xml(explained later).

5. Create and submit sitemap.xml to webmaster tool: Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. It also tells crawler about your sitemap.xml using robot.txt file.

6. Check Your website performance: Before making a website live, you must check its performance(load speed and other errors). For this you can use google pagespeed tool.

So these are some points which can help you achieve the purpose for which you are creating your website.

It may possible that I have missed some other important points, which you are welcome to mention in comments.