After attending the 2012 Engine Summit and hearing Emily Lewis talk about the value of having checklists to keep her work organized, I was inspired to pull together a checklist of my own which I've shared below. I set these up in my project management software ActiveCollab and copy them to each new project as needed.

I've organized the list by a few of the key project milestones I tend to plan around. My unique twist on this checklist is that as I develop websites in ExpressionEngine, point out where various EE addons can help make certain tasks easier, faster or better. You'll notice I list several alternatives for each item as each tends to do things a little differently and I like to make a case-by-case decision about which addon is right for each project. I also don't always use addons for each item, but I do take a moment to see if it makes sense. A good rule of thumb for me is to ask "Do I want to have to maintain/update this addon down the road?", which helps me to keep things on the conservative side.

A special thanks to Lea Alcantara for given this list a look and making some suggestions. Did I miss anything major? Please let me know in the comments.

Setup Phase

• General

  • Buy Domain Name & Document

  • Setup Hosting & Document

  • Create MySQL databases & Document

  • Redirect sitename.com to www.sitename.com (or vice versa) for SEO

  • Create email addresses & Document

  • Setup staging server & Document
     

• ExpressionEngine Specific

  • Remove unnecessary files from latest EE download

  • Zip files before upload and uncompress via server (Article)

  • Security: Install EE above public_html directory

  • Security: rename admin.php

Pre-Launch Phase (2 weeks before)

• General

  • Create 404 Pages ( SS Friendly 404 )

  • Finalize Page Title scheme

  • Create Favicon

  • Create iOS icons

  • SEO Optimize all pages (SEO Lite / Crosslinking / NSM Better Meta )

  • Paginated content links rel=”next” and rel=”prev”

  • Use Google Webmaster to force crawl of new pages

  • Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools email forwarding (notes issues with crawling)

• Per Page

  • Validate HTML

  • Ensure Alt attributes for images

  • Check design in various browsers

  • Check design at various sizes
     

• ExpressionEngine Specific

  • Set caching ( Cache Buster / CE Cache / Cache / Static Page Caching )

  • Minify / Compress JS/HTML/CSS (Asset Linker / AutoMin / Minimee / NSM Minify )

  • Version CSS Links (Cache-Buster)

  • Profile Performance for each template and optimize (JB Graphite )

  • Ensure all non-essential items are disabled in Entry tags

  • Customize cpanel per member group ( Zoo Flexible Admin / Zenbu )

  • Optimize Entry Form layout/tabs for all channels

  • Upload zip files of all addons and EE install to non-public folder

  • Ensure all forms are spam-proofed

  • Ensure proper membership groups and permissions are specified

Pre-Launch Phase (1-2 days before launch)

• Spell check/Grammar Check all content

• Test contact form

• Test email addresses

• Double check contact info

• Clear out TEST data

• Create robots.txt files

• Send out Launch email to client

• Create Google Site Map (NSM Better Meta / sitemap-module)

• Add 301 redirects for old pages to new pages

• Check for broken links (Xenu Link Sleuth)

• ​Add Google analytics code

Post-Launch Phase

• Register website on Google, Yahoo, Bing

• Promote on various gallery sites

• Promote on Facebook

• Promote on Twitter

• Update Portfolio

• Write Case Study

3-6 Month Followup

• Update EE ver (if needed)

• Update plugins/addons (if needed)

• Backup website / db

• Check spam in members and freeform

• Review site analytics

• Review Search log

• Check formatting of site results in SERPs