You’ve crafted, coded and tested your website. Everything links and works correctly. You’ve used tags in a logical, semantic fashion to mark up your content, and added meta tags to guide search engines in indexing your site. You’ve optimised your graphics until they squeaked, and are satisfied that everything is in place. Are you done?

Well… not quite.

There are several final steps a really top–notch web designer should undertake before presenting the final site as “complete”. In the wider world, this is known as “fit and finish”: the final, tiny extra details that make the difference between a product that is good, functional, yet unremarkable, and the truly outstanding. All MP3 players, for example, do essentially the same task. It was the obsessive, almost maniacal attention to detail of Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive (Apple’s lead industrial designer) that made the iPod so popular with the general public, and thus the market leader. It is addition of the small, final touches that often separates the merely good from the truly great.

In the case of your web site, these steps should include creating a favicon and a 404 redirect page.