Checklist for starting a website [closed]

(I have largely left out the business side, as I read OPs question to be about the technology & implementation.)

1. Do hallway usability testing, i.e. put some people down in front of screen mockups, and see if they can successfully complete simple tasks on your proposed website design.

2. Figure out how you want to host your site. It's generally not a big problem anymore, but depending on your business strategy, different methods may be more or less suitable. If you need cloud computing hosting, then that's something to get included in your development plan, as cloud computing will require some changes to the architecture.

3. Find a good & cheap graphical designer to make your site good-looking in the eyes of your customers. This is surprisingly hard, as a) the whole world is looking for good & cheap designers, and b) sense of æstetics differs between cultures, so it's often hard to outsource with good results.

4. Think about browsers & web tech for your target market -- which browsers do you need to support, how much interactivity (Javascript) do you need, how much quality assurance / testing do you need? (Hint: As the amount of JS, AJAX, FLEX and so forth goes up, and the list of supported browsers is increased, the testing scope increases dramatically.)

5. Think about backups of customer data, disaster recovery, security, and day to day IT operations in general. How will your company provide the uptime and security that customers expect from a hosted solution?

6. Set up uptime monitoring / error alerting (Pingdom, mon.itor.us, Gomez or similar).

7. Think long and hard about how you'll identify the right co-founder / outsourced technology provider; and structure the business relationship with him/them.

• Test your front-end in multiple browsers (FF, Chrome, Safari, IE6+).

Optional but useful:

• Add an easy way to share your website (ReTweet button, FB share, etc.)
• Add an easy way to get feedback from your users (UserVoice.com, GetSatisfaction.com, etc.)
• Subscribe to alert services to track what people are saying about you (Google Alerts, Social Mention)

Good points here.

I've used AddThis to get the button to enable easy sharing of the site. It's excellent. Easy to use and helpful analytics as well. Big fan.

You probably also want to have a privacy policy and short terms of service. If you're going to use Adsense, a privacy policy is mandatory. We've used TRUSTe for help managing privacy issues and are finding it helpful - particularly with EU compliance issues.

What you need to do next is to take your idea through an opportunity evaluation process. This is where you can tweak, improve and plan the BUSINESS side of it (as opposed to the product.)

Things you should look at include being really specific about who your customers are, how you are going to generate revenue, what business model you will use, how you can prevent others copying you (creating a sustainable competitive advantage), what resources you need and looking at the risks and how you can mitigate them. And of course do some financial projections.

It is also important to test your idea in the market.

Mindmaps show the main issues you need to tackle. And it is really important to validate all your planning and thinking by getting out there and talking to people who know the market and also by doing secondary research.

Basically the end result you want is to feel confident that there is a business opportunity there. You also want to adjust your initial idea if you find that it's not quite what the market wants or if it doesn't seem like it's going to be profitable.

Once you've been through the process you will have a really deep knowledge of your business and industry and have the basis of a great business plan.

It sounds like a lot of work, but I train a lot of people in this process and they generally feel it's really worth doing. The pay off in improving your idea and identifying the key issues for your business is huge! And it can also save you a lot of money if your idea is not profitable - either by changing it to improve it or ditching it and moving on to something else.

Good luck! and Let the Adventure begin!

• Integrate web analytics.
• Integrate payment solution.
• some SEO.