On the verge of launching a new release of a public SharePoint website and I came across this list (from shanselman’s twitter actually).

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Here’s how we fared:

1. Favicon – checked and done!
2. Titles and Meta data – checked!  Actually SharePoint comes with quite a bit of baggage, but we started with a clean masterpage so this is not too bad.
3. Cross-Browser Checks – checked!  IE6, 7, 8, FireFox, Chrome, Safari + iPhone.  RichHTML editing is limited to IE for now – but there’s a release soon afterwards to upgrade to Telerik’s RadEditor Lite.
4. Proofread – not enough :-(
5. Links – checked - using both SharePoint’s internal reports and SSW Link Auditor – hopefully the content editors don’t put in bad links from now til launch…
6. Functionality Check – checked!  My biggest fears are that in the sprint until launch, if we accidentally break an existing feature that was working previously, so far my fears have been unfounded.
7. Graceful Degradation – not checked…  I think I’m going to feel guilty for saying this one, but I just don’t think it’s relevant to check for JavaScript now.  Especially on a SharePoint site.
8. Validation – no - it’s SharePoint.  This is going to be a tough one to tick off.
9. RSS Link – checked – may be.  One of the features of this release, unless we have to cut it.
10. Analytics – checked – both the SharePoint reports, as well as Google Analytics that was used for the old site
11. Sitemap – checked – SharePoint does this naturally
12. Defensive Design – checked.  SharePoint allows for 404 to be customized
13. Optimize – not enough.  We’re utilizing quite a few performance tricks we have up our sleeves, but ultimately there’s just not the level of control in SharePoint vs. say a custom ASP.NET application
14. Back Up – checked
15. Print Style Sheet – need to check again.  This was working previously but we’ve had some work done on the site in the last two releases and I’m a bit worried about our good ol’ print css.

So we scored 10/15.  Ticked off most of the easy ones.  Have quite a few really tough ones left.  Wish us luck!