It’s always very exciting to get a new website live after months of hard work. You want the world to see it and start feeling the benefits of having a shining new website – BUT – no matter how tempting it may be, never launch a new website on a Friday! If you launch on a Friday chances are you will do a few more quick tests then go home for the weekend. When you return to work on Monday you will no doubt find error messages for things that didn’t quite work as they should have over the weekend – not really the best of starts for a new site.
The key to a successful launch is to agree a day early on in the week, make sure everyone involved is notified of the date, then test, test, test! If more development has to be done as a result of the testing then don’t be afraid to move your launch date – often last minute changes can sometimes undo other functionality. Your website developer should take care of all cross browser and accessibility issues and add your google analytic codes but you need to go through the site and check all links, forms, content, images and spellings. Sometimes it helps to get a fresh pair of eyes to go through the website content so ask a few friends or work colleagues to have a look at it before you go live. Of course if you are launching an e-commerce website or a database driven CMS there will more in-depth checking and testing to be done.
Once your website is live it’s advisable to let it “bed in” for a few days before you send out a press releases or tell everyone on your facebook or twitter account. No website is ever perfect when it goes live – it’s a good approach to have some budget in place to refine and improve your website once you have a few months of statistics to see what is really happening on your website and how your customers are using the site. It may also take a few months for your website to show on organic search engine results if it’s a new domain name so be prepared to push traffic to your site via other means in the first few months, this could be the press, targeted mail outs, social media, google AdWords or paid directory listings – it really depends on your budget and marketing plan.