charles 3 April 2009

When taking a site live onto a production server, it's always tempting to rush the last few steps, especially if you're under a launch deadline, or if you've been working on the same site so long that you're sick of it. At this point it's important to sit back, take a breath, and be sure to go through the following pre-flight checklist:

  1. Check for broken links
  2. Disable any debugging lines in your code
  3. For PHP-based sites, set error_reporting to NONE. Errors should be redirected to a log file.
  4. Remove any insecure files like phpinfo.php
  5. Be sure your .htaccess file contains the Options -Indexes directive
  6. Validate your markup, css and accessibility standards
  7. Check for broken links again.

If you're using Firefox, you'll also want to check out the following add-on modules:

  • Web Developer: Indispensable Swiss Army Knife toolkit
  • User Agent Switcher: Allows Firefox to forge http response headers and pose as IE or another browser
  • Pinger: Check for broken links on a page