Unleashing a new website

Dear PropellerHeads: I'm just about to announce a brand new website and would like to ensure it performs well once the masses start to visit. Do you have any tips in that area?

A: So, you think you have the next Facebook, Amazon, Twitter or YouTube, do ya? Well, just remember after you've made your billions, that you owe it all to us PropellerHeads, because without us, your site might have derailed before it got out of the station!

I tend to think of website performance in two broad, equally important, yet vastly different categories: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Site Performance Optimization (SPO). The first ensures that your website content is tuned properly so that people can find you quickly, easily and instead of your competitors. The second guarantees that once those people find your site, they will not go away while waiting for your site to load in their browser.

Both will require tweaking of your content - the HTML and multimedia files your site delivers to them. But the latter may require hardware and software changes beyond just your website. As your site is just starting out, I'll focus on some free and low cost web services out there that can help you out with both.

For SEO, there are a number of free analysis tools out there, and the quality ranges greatly. But they all say the same thing: content is king. Meaning, your content should actually contain a high, prominent and relevant density of the phrases you expect people to type into a search engine in order to find your site.

That said, the following analyzers are better than average: WooRank.com, PearAnalytics.com and WebsiteGrader.com. Naturally, as Google is not evil, it has a very lengthy discussion on the process: www.google.com/webmasters/tools.

For SPO, things fall into more or less three different areas: speed, stress and uptime. In the case of speed, this ensures the content that you are delivering is as small as possible. For instance, a page with 20 parts (images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.) and a total of 200KB will be better and faster than a page with 80 parts and 800KB. That's common sense, right? An excellent tool for giving you the big picture and tips for reducing your content site is websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze.

YSlow by Yahoo and PageSpeed by Google are two Firefox add-ons that also provide a good analysis in this area.

We all experience stress, including websites. Will your website hold up when it goes viral? Or will it bog down like a Pentium 2 running MS Vista? LoadImpact.com provides free load testing for simulating up to 50 concurrent users. More than that will require you to spend some dough.

Finally, your website might be the best thing since deep fried beer, but if it isn't up 24/7, you might be working at 7-11 before too long. Again, there are numerous services out there that will monitor your site and let you know if it is ever down. What separates them is how frequently your website is checked and how many different ways it can notify you. A good tool for this is UptimeRobot.com, which checks every five minutes and can notify you of problems via e-mail, SMS or even Twitter.

Don't forget us when you hit the big time. Get back to us after your first billion comes in - our fees are based on a percentage of profits. Thank you.

When the PropellerHeads at Data Directions aren't busy with their IT projects, they love to answer questions on business or consumer technology. E-mail them to questions@askthepropellerheads.com or contact us at Data Directions Inc., 8510 Bell Creek Road, Mechanicsville, VA 23116. Visit our website at www.askthepropellerheads.com.