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Written by Larry Dearing
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Wednesday, 09 June 2010 10:36 |
We’ve all been to websites that are still unfinished and in varying stages of construction or re-working. To me, it’s like going to work half dressed. If your online image is important to you and you want to always have your best foot forward, you may want to consider developing your new website in an area less public where you can sort things out until you’re truly ready to present your website live. Here’s a few tips to consider.
Primarily this is about appearance and professionalism. You don’t want those hard found visitors to see something half finished. As Marc Bloch put it in one of his blogs, an under construction or coming soon sign may as well say “never coming” to some visitors. This problem is even worse when using templates where you still have demo content on pages as placeholders that contains text and images that have nothing to do with your site or message.
Consider developing your site in a separate /dev directory under your site root and then moving it to your root directory when finished. This is particularly useful during a website make-over. Your current site can stay live, while you work on the new version under wraps. (Just remember to use “relative” URL’s for your internal links!) If this is a new site, the easiest thing to do is simply put a blank index.html file in the root directory and deleting it when you move your site there live.
There are some search engine considerations as well. If your site is crawled while under development, search engines are indexing information from your page you don’t want it to and that may take some time to get rid of. You can avoid this little catastrophe by simply denying spider, or “bot” access in your robots.txt file in your root directory. If this is a new site, go ahead and “deny all”. Just remember to update this when you go live so search engines can crawl your site. If this is a website make-over, simply deny access to your development directly, for example yoursite.com/dev. ; When you move your reworked site live to the root directory, all your new material will be crawled.
By taking a few fairly straightforward precautions you can insure visitors to your website a consistent and informative experience. Your website will be seen as being serious and professional for your particular content area. In addition to the obvious visual and content appeal, you can eliminate meaningless and possibly harmful content being indexed by search engines resulting in a loss in search engine positioning.
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