Before You Publish
It seems there is always a rush to publish a new site. Either you are fighting a deadline and need at least some content up by a specific time, or you are just excited about what your new site will look like online. Take a deep breath and give some thought to the following before you publish your site.
- Change the page title on all pages as appropriate.
- Your page title carries weight in the search engines. A page title of "Home" or "Contact" tells nothing about your site, so giive some careful thought to good descriptive titles. It is especially important for you to change the title on the home page. Trust me, you do not want Google to index your site and list "Template 1900" as your title.
- Reset form properties to contain your email address.
- In our newer templates, the contact page form has not been formatted. You will have to set the form properties. You can find details on how to do this in our topic Receive Form Results by Email. In some earlier templates, the contact page form is active and includes our email address. If you do not change it, we will be receiving emails from your customers. (90% of these misdirected emails end up deleted because we do not know where they originate. Have your web host set your SMTP server correctly so your form comes from your site and not from the hosting company.)
- Preview all pages by going to File > Preview in Browser.
- While FrontPage 2003 has a preview tab, it is not a reliable prediction of how your site will look when published. Always check your site by going to File > Preview in Browser. It's also a very good idea to check your site in more than one browser so we recommend you download and install the FireFox browser. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
- Either delete or modify the keywords and description meta tags on each page.
- In each template, we include blank "meta tags" for keywords and description. While not all search engines read these meta tags, it is a good idea to edit these tags as appropriate to your site. You can edit each page's meta tags through the Page Properties dialog box or by hand in split or code view. Again, you do not want to publish with the meta tags showing "add your content here".
- Spell check each page.
- This is just common sense. Running a quick spell check (F7) on each page is fast and easy. Yes, it is still possible to use a wrong word -- red for read -- but only careful editing will catch those kinds of errors.
- Don't publish pages that are not ready for prime time.
- Do not publish the template without editing the text first. Placing the template online without editing the pages is like redistributing the template and is not acceptable in your license agreement. If you have some pages that are not quite ready for the world to see, it is better not to publish those pages rather than have "under construction" signs on the page. After all, a web site is always being changed as new content is added. You can specify that a page or pages not be published by right-clicking on the page in the folder view and selecting Do Not Publish from the menu.
- Not quite sure? Publish to a test location first.
- Most web hosts who offer the server extensions will also allow you to publish "child webs". You can publish your site to http://www.yoursite.com/testweb/ that will create a folder inside of your root web called "testweb". This is an independent web where you can test all of your new site's features. This may be especially important if you have an existing site already and want to test your new one. Once everything is as it should be, you can remove your current site and publish your new one.