1. Switch off debugging output. All errors and warnings should go to logs and not your site output. You might leave it for your office IP’s, if you have a way to see what others see (additional IP’s or proxies). You do not want others to know what happens in your site, especially if your debugger leaves your database connection information visible (security breach).
2. Once again, use your site as a simple, new user. You should look for usability and functionality problems, in most popular browsers preferably.
3. Stress-test major page types on your site. A good free tool for this is ab (apache benchmark), included with apache distribution, though I am sure there are better ones. Make sure your site is usable.
4. Make list of things you could optimize in the future if necessary.
5. Check all links for duplicates and 404 errors. Good way to check site for 404 is running a site grabber from your PC and checking error logs for missing pages. Adobe acrobat is quite good grabber for smallish sites (several thousands of pages), as it compiles a document where you could search for duplicates.
6. Check for major security holes:
   1. Try to enter quoted text in all the forms, they should be escaped in database. If not, your site is vulnerable to SQL injection
   2. Check for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, i.e. including files through urls
   3. Change password for administrative user
7. Check if your sitemap and RSS regenerates successfully after you add information. On-the-fly RSS and (especially) sitemap generation might be slow.
8. Check SEO of your site – titles, headings, keywords, robots meta-tag, robots.txt, etc.
9. Check if site is accessible from “outside” – .htaccess allow/deny lists or blocks in code.
10. Submit your sites sitemap to Search Engines. Include sitemap in your robots.txt file as well.
11. Add links to several pages of your site in other sites. Good places to start are related blogs and directories. If you have a blog in new site, make a post and make sure it pings blog search engines as well. This speeds up indexing of website.
12. Check access, error logs and server loads after a while. Look if spiders started to crawl your website.

This post is not about my experience as freelancer, although I do freelance now and then. This post is about my experience consulting companies about their web projects and seeing what they got from freelancers and smallish companies. Here are some of the main problems:

1. Quality of website. Some of freelancers do not write top notch code, quite often they assemble website from what they have, and then write FAST. This has implications to the quality. You pay hourly rates for maintaining/updating code usually, so the quality is important.
2. Maintaining costs.  Freelancer will do best paying jobs first, that is larger projects. They can’t scale.  Small projects or maintenance tasks are quite unimportant for them, so they might get postponed endlessly. I know more than one case that proves this. We had one guy with freelancer background that just copied website and changed field queried in the code when implementing second language. Sure, that’s fast, but we have to maintain 2 versions of site.
3. You might buy things they have no rights to sell. Many freelancers work in software companies, and some of them use code belonging to company in their freelance activities. That’s illegal, although hard to prove. Now problem would arise if you have to switch to that company or someone notices that your site runs on proprietary framework you haven’t paid for (officially).  So do not be happy when they say that they would purchase this framework for lots of money in company. Just ask them if they sell it legally.
4. You should check the rights on design as well, especially if photos are used. Model/famous people photos might be proprietary.  Even large companies fall for that.

I would still recommend considering freelancers in many cases, but do not fall in some of the pitfalls. Here some tips.

1. You should control DNS and hosting, not them. If they require “special” setup only they can provide, switch to other developer. That is not reliable. This is true for working with companies as well.
2. You are responsible for backups as well. You will thank for this when they accidently drop important database table or delete crucial php script.
3. Sign an agreement. Fat chance that you will be able to do so with freelancer, but you should try. His signature is at least some guarantee of good intentions; also it will cover schedule and terms of payments. And this is important for both sides.
4. Ask them if you will be able to edit all the files yourself later on. If not, go to next developers. Some of the “companies” encode their code. This is not a nice practice as you pay for code anyways. You do not want to be forced working with any company for lifetime of the project.
5. Google some when they tell you what they develop your website in. Do not trust people that work with exotic frameworks/cms/languages.  I would even recommend picking couple of frameworks for your companies yourself and then sticking to them for a while. This would reduce costs when you need to maintain the code.  I know at least one company that works with framework in Python no one else uses in town (doubt anyone uses even Python in here). Their clients have to look for long if they want to switch. Luckily for them, they are good enough in their specialty, so I can still recommend them to clients.
6. You should ask if something is not clear. Always.

Any other tips? Issues? Ideas ?

So, you lost your domain. Maybe due to credit card fail during renewal, maybe the mail address of domain got hacked. Or maybe you lost a case on domain to competition. Happened to our rivals once.

After lots of screaming and slapping yourself the question comes what to do next. So, a quick check list:

1. Fix the reason you lost the domain. Update your credit card details, change the email for all of the domains to the one you actually read. 
2. Evaluate and start using what remains from domain. Launch the site under new name or decide what you want to do with all the content. If you feel better, make an excuse that this was a strategy all along and the former name sucks no longer reflect what you are or do.
3. In case that the domain still points to your server, make 301 redirect to new website. The best way is to use .htacces and point old content to new content directly and not just to the new domain. This is a very likely scenario in case of court order. Also, it helps with double content problem later on.
4. Do the link search for your old domain. In some cases you might be able to update address to the new one. In some cases it is not possible. But you have to try. 
5. Check ALL your sites for the links to the old site and update it to new one. Doublecheck the site again. Many people forget this issue and they might give a backlink or two to the people who stole their precious name.
6. If the competition lauches a site on the lost domain, check with your legal departament. In some cases it is illegal to do so, in some dont. This was a case when poker site bodog lost their domain due to a court order in brand name case. Make life for competition as difficult as possible.
7. Promote, promote, promote. 

You will not regain popularity easily. But there is a hope for comeback.

Any other ideas what to do?

This post was inspired by very careless actions of some of our competitors.