How to get a website live using ASP.NET and SQL

OK, I know this is a big topic to discuss in one blog post but I want to start a post which I will update constantly as I learn and implement new ideas/concepts in developing/hosting a website. The reason why I wanted to start this post is because I created couple of websites in last few months and there were lot of interesting things that I learned. These are not really complex stuff, but more simple things like setting sitemap, robots etc.

I created a website using ASP.NET and SQL as backend. I am not going into the details of development; let me list what I had to do to deploy/host this site.

This is more like a checklist- some are minor stuff but things that really helped me to run a successful site.

1.  Website name – the first thing to do is to come up with a website name. You can check if the name is available in sites like register.com or godaddy.com

2.  Register name and set up hosting servers – Again these can be done using services provided by godaddy.com or register.com

3.  Create DB – I used SQL DB for backend. Run scripts to create tables, stored procedures and functions.

4.  Upload web application files – Upload the files of your application to the FTP server.

Make sure that pages have –

a Meaningful titles

b Meta tags with description/keywords

These are mainly for optimizing your site for search engine (SEO)

Don't forget to set a 'default' landing page for your site.

5.  Setup Email server – You need an email sever to send mails and to get mails from ‘contact us’ section of your website

6.  Track exceptions/errors – Track exceptions occurring from your site by logging in database and/or sending emails to you. Also make sure that you have a custom error page to handle all exceptions.

7.  Create a sitemap.xml – Sitemap lists the pages of your site. This will be used by crawlers

8.  Create a robots.txt – Robot file specifies which urls the crawler should exclude from crawling.

9.  User behavior/traffic -  If you want to know about the user traffic and behavior you should implement Google analytics in your site

10.  Favorite icon – Don’t forget to set an icon for your website

11.  Advertise!

I will be updating this post with more details later.