Checklist for Publishing a Web Site
by Agatha Taormina

 

Before you first publish a new web site (or a new section of an existing web site), use a checklist to ensure that your pages have been created correctly.
Folder Your web site pages should reside in a folder named for the URL of the home page of the site.
  For example: I intend that visitors access my new Science Fiction Web Site with the following URL:
http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/scifi
  Thus I will save all the pages of my web site in progress to a folder called scifi
Home Page

The home page of the site should be named default.htm

With that filename, there is no need to type the file name in the URL.
Each Page

All pages in the site should meet the following criteria:

  • Footer containing
    • Date of last revision
    • Email link to creator
    • Copyright if desired
  • ALT tag for all graphics, including navigation bar buttons
  • A link back to the site home page

Note that if the site is part of a larger site there should be a link back to the overall site home page on the section home page.
Navigation All navigation bar links should be relative links, that is, they should be links back to the filenames of the other pages of the site and not be absolute links which use the entire site URL.
 

Example: my web site will have a subfolder called history; this folder will contain all of the pages related to the history of science fiction. The cover, or home, page of that folder will be called default.htm.

To link to that cover page from the site home page I will use the relative path, i.e., history/default.htm rather than the absolute path:
http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/scifi/history
 

There are two major reasons to use relative links within a web site.

  • New pages will appear more quickly since the browser doesn't have to go all the way out to the Internet and back again to retrieve them
  • If you ever decide to move the entire site to a new ISP, you can simply move the folder. All of the links within the folder will still work.
Testing Once you have uploaded your pages, open a browser and check your pages to be sure everything has migrated smoothly and all your images show up and all your links work.

 

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Last Revised: August 28, 2009
©2001  Agatha Taormina