Launching a new website is kind of like having a baby- the process is long, and patience is a virtue. Like any birth, the process goes much more smoothly with careful thought and planning. 

1. Time Allocation: Successful site launches take at least eight weeks, if not longer, from start to finish. You can push the timeline, but that might not give you enough time to carefully consider user interface (UI), usability and design. Even the most simple websites should take weeks of planning and design. Rushing the planning and design process often ends up costing companies more money because they end up redoing their site more often than companies who have thought through the goals of the website.

2. Consider SEO: Another tip for a successful website launch is making sure you're considering SEO when launching your site. If you're already spending weeks to build your website, it is worth launching with a good SEO strategy for your launch and the months following. Make sure you've taken the five minutes to set up a Google Analytics account so that you can track the success of your launch. Additionally, it is important to remember 301 redirects if you're launching an existing site so that you don't lose your previous SEO investment.

3. Develop a Pre-Launch and Post-Launch To-Do List: Need to change your Twitter background to go with your new site? Want to make sure that your new website launch isn't going to shut down your email service? Develop a comprehensive list of to-dos both pre- and post-launch to make your website launch go more smoothly. This will allow you to allocate enough resources ahead of time so that you're not 'burning the midnight oil' tying up lose ends for your site launch.

4. Develop a QA Checklist: A QA (Quality Assurance) checklist is extremely important for complex site launches. Do you have a user login? Complex forms around your website? Is there a payment gateway? Custom development? If the answer to any of these is "yes," then I suggest writing out a QA checklist. Develop a list of all major site functions, and then define points for each of these site functions that might break. Then, give your QA checklist to someone else who isn't close the project so that they can catch possible site errors.

Because many businesses rely on web traffic for a large part of their revenue, search engine optimization is still a hot topic in the IT industry, and probably will be for years to come. SEO is a complex beast with many ins and outs - one important piece of SEO is search engine friendly URLs (SEF). SEF URLs are those which are easily human-readable, and do not contain querystrings with variables (i.e. http://aquabluemarketing.com/marketing-20-blog instead of http://aquabluemarketing.com/index.php?section=marketing-20-blog). Many search engines do not like webpages with querystrings as much as SEF URLs - and you want Google to like your webpage!

Content management systems like Joomla make it easy to create SEF links. Instead of custom programming for each of your website's pages, you are simply required to turn on an SEF setting and voila! Instant Google-friendly links. If you don't like the link created for you by default, you can customize the url through the Joomla interface. So as I've explained, the default Joomla installation ships with pretty good SEO and SEF capabilities out of the box. However, here is one SEF technique the Joomla developers have not implemented yet.

If you allow frontend users to login to your Joomla site, you probably link to the login page or display the login module, or both. From these, you may have noticed that links to "Forgot your password?" and "Forgot your username?" show nice links like "/component/user/reset" and "/component/user/remind". But the default register link is different - it looks like "/component/user/?task=register". Functionally, this is not a problem - your register page will work as it should. However, your register page will have a hard time getting picked up by search engines, because the link ends in a querystring. If you want to change this, here's how:

if you are using a non-default template, and the template defines the following files, modify them:
TEMPLATE_DIR/html/com_user/login/default_login.php (for the page)
TEMPLATE_DIR/html/mod_login/default.php (for the module)

otherwise, modify these default template files:
components/com_user/views/login/tmpl/default_login.php
modules/mod_login/tmpl/default.php