Every time I start a new project I try do things right. I try to lay a solid foundation and make sure all my bases are covered so the site functions correctly now and is easy to maintain in the future. But something always slips through the net.

So for a while I have been thinking of putting together an exhaustive list of features / elements a new site ought to have. That is not to say they must have – you may decide some elements aren’t required in a particular circumstance. But given a list of things you ought to have, at least you can make a choice which to include and which not to (rather than forget).

If this all sounds a bit vague, let me give some examples off the top of my head to get the list going. Obviously this is a little subjective as these are concerns I have when starting a new site and as such some are quite specific to my development environment (WAMP / LAMP), but here we go:

A website should…

• have a valid doctype
• validate against it’s doctype
• have correctly filled document headers
  • Content-type
  • Title – clear,concise and related to the page content
  • Keywords – short list and related to the page content
  • Description -short description related to the page content
• have a favicon
• use external CSS files and Javascript to separate presentation and behavior
• degrade gracefully
• use appropriate alt text for all images
• have lowercase filenames and URLs
• have nice URLs (use modrewrite or equivalent)
• work across the main browsers (FF 2 & 3, IE 6-8, Safari)
• not use too many purely decorative elements in it’s markup
• use microformats where possible
• be fast to load
• have a custom 404 page
• have a site map
• have a contact form or email address
  • use CAPTCHA security for contact forms

This is by no means an exhaustive list, so please add your thoughts in the comments. I suppose this could all be wrapped up in a ‘cheat sheet’ of some kind, perhaps this has already been done – let me know!