Accessibility feature: Skip to content
  • Standards Compliance
    • Valid XHTML v1.0 Valid CSS
    • Print Compatible StyleSheet
  • Accessibility
    • Level A conformance icon, W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Website Features

Obviously, the most important aspect of a website is its content, however here is a list of features/tools/rules that all new websites should probably implement (and are sometimes easy to forget):

  • Standards Compliant XHTML v1.0 (Transitional or Strict) using Appendix C Compatibility Guidelines.
  • Correct MIME Type & Character Encoding (UTF-8).
  • Presentational separation using CSS (including Print Compatible CSS).
  • A Sitemaps.Org Sitemap (used by Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and soon Live! Search).
  • Integration with Google Analytics, or another suitable stats package.
  • Robots.txt.
  • Favicon.
  • RSS feeds for news sections of the site.
  • Use of the <link> attribute.
  • Accessibility features: tabindex, accesskey, "skip to content" link.
  • Custom error pages.
  • If possible: Behavioural separation & "Unobtrusive JavaScript" techniques (difficult to achieve with ASP.NET).
  • Keywords and Description <meta> tags (this is not so important these days).