8 Tips For Launching Your Website (Part 2)
03 March 2009 12:25 | Posted by Dermot
Go here for for part 1.
5. Be different
The content and design of your site should emphasize clearly and succinctly to a user what makes you different than your competitors. You need to communicate the organisation's distinct brand and personality.
6. Be the same
While you should certainly innovate when it comes to your message, you should be wary of innovating in how you deliver that message. People are web-savvy enough these days to expect things online to work in a certain way and will get frustrated if those expectations are not met.
Examples of best practices include:
7. Be Involved In The Build
You should get involved in the build process as much as possible. If you want to maintain momentum in the site build, you need to be giving feedback early and often. The development team should be able to give you a daily version of the site for you to review.
While you should certainly make changes, over the course of the build, those changes should become smaller and smaller. For example, by the end of the build, you should be tweaking the text rather than overhauling the colour scheme.
8. Launch!
Another big mistake that people make is not launching the website. They can have a 'Coming soon' on their site for months, or worse, they have a launch date for the new site listed that is in the past. This can happen for a number of reasons:
'Releasing early' means releasing the very minimum with which you would be comfortable showing a customer. Remember that the sooner you launch the sooner you can start getting attention and making money. Don't worry about not having all the features, they can be added over time.
'Releasing often' makes the next release date easier to estimate simply because there is less to estimate and hence less to go wrong. Your release dates should be weeks even days apart. 9 months should be the absolute upper range between releases.
Dermot Brennan
Web Developer
5. Be different
The content and design of your site should emphasize clearly and succinctly to a user what makes you different than your competitors. You need to communicate the organisation's distinct brand and personality.
6. Be the same
While you should certainly innovate when it comes to your message, you should be wary of innovating in how you deliver that message. People are web-savvy enough these days to expect things online to work in a certain way and will get frustrated if those expectations are not met.
Examples of best practices include:
- Logo in the top left corner.
- Layout doesn't change between pages.
- Consistent navigation - People expect a navigation system near the top of the page or on the left hand side. They expect it to stay the same as they browse the site.
- Left-aligned text
- Minimal to no distracting animation
7. Be Involved In The Build
You should get involved in the build process as much as possible. If you want to maintain momentum in the site build, you need to be giving feedback early and often. The development team should be able to give you a daily version of the site for you to review.
While you should certainly make changes, over the course of the build, those changes should become smaller and smaller. For example, by the end of the build, you should be tweaking the text rather than overhauling the colour scheme.
8. Launch!
Another big mistake that people make is not launching the website. They can have a 'Coming soon' on their site for months, or worse, they have a launch date for the new site listed that is in the past. This can happen for a number of reasons:
- Having less time than expected to work on content and/or feedback.
- Writing content/feedback requires more work than originally estimated.
- Change of scope in the website :-
- Organisations might add increasing amounts of features during the build. Each of these adds time and money.
- An organisation might undergo a change of direction halfway through the build resulting in having to start from scratch.
- Waiting on feedback from stakeholders.
- Perfectionism and misplaced priorities. For example, spending months on a look-and-feel and not leaving any time to write content. Get the most basic and important things done first.
'Releasing early' means releasing the very minimum with which you would be comfortable showing a customer. Remember that the sooner you launch the sooner you can start getting attention and making money. Don't worry about not having all the features, they can be added over time.
'Releasing often' makes the next release date easier to estimate simply because there is less to estimate and hence less to go wrong. Your release dates should be weeks even days apart. 9 months should be the absolute upper range between releases.
Dermot Brennan
Web Developer
No comments yet.