This is my checklist for deploying PHP / Kohana based web application projects.
Pre-develop
- Will the layout be responsive or fixed?
- How to address the user (informal / formal)
- URL scheme - readable, semantic, short
Frontend
Markup
- Does it have a favicon?
- Does it have a <title> tag that changes for every page?
- Does it have <meta> author, description, charset?
- Did you test the layout with IE 7, 8, 9, Opera, Firefox, Chrome?
- Did you test it with common screen resolutions?
- Does the main logo link to the front page?
- Does the HTML validate?
- Does it have (Google) Analytics?
- Did you optimize and concatenation script, style and image (thumbs!) resource?
- Does it have a print stylesheet?
User Experience
- Did you go over all the texts, tooltips, instructions one more time? Can they be made more specific and shorter?
- Does it have an informative 404 page?
- Do you have informative help texts?
- Are you validating forms with JS?
Backend
- Are system-level folders, resources protected (.htaccess)?
- Does it have a separate database username?
- Are events logged?
- Can it do self-diagnosis and notification on critical errors?
- Did you protect against unauthorized usage (permission checks on certain actions)?
Database
- Is the database indexed?
- Is the database documented (ERD, comments)?