For a website which is largely database navigation and which you want to attract search engines to, you want to make sure that as much of the website is available without requiring a login as is possible.

For instance, if you’re developing a restaurant review website (ahem), you really want to make sure that the information about the restaurants is available without making the user login. You probably want to have a few features like rating or reviewing a restaurant that will only be available to logged-in users, but the display of the restaurant’s information should look as similar as it can between the logged-in and not-logged-in cases.

In fact, if you can dangle the features that a logged-in user has access to in front of a not-logged in user then all the better; you may get a few signups that way.

Given all that, a really important thing to remember is to test your website both logged in and not logged in so that if you’ve accidentally made assumptions that a user will be logged in when you innocently display a page, and then bomb out because some object is missing… well, that’s just not a good situation and being a little more careful about those assumptions will help a lot.

Something I really need to look into at some point is building a set of tools to drive the website for automated testing, so that I can have a chance of catching these sorts of problems without having to walk through it manually.
[tags]testing, login, search engines[/tags]

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