We took an informal poll in our offices at ROCeteer and determined that between us, we’ve all been involved in so many new product and site launches throughout our careers that we have lost count.
What we could do was put together the list of 20 things that you should definitely do to make sure that any new website, campaign or SaaS product you launch will be a success.
Drumroll please!
Define your Goals
What is the purpose of your site? You will need to have clearly defined goals to measure the success, and be able to objectively analyze the results you get. This also helps you to with the overall design and framework.
Determine your Architecture
Once you’ve figured out the “Why” of your site, your next question is “How?” Will you use a CMS like WordPress to manage it, or will you design something from scratch with HTML, or even Rails or Django? Figuring out your backend will make future decisions much easier.
Design Your Brand
Now you will need to create your “Style Guide”, which includes your logo, your colors, and any fonts you want to use throughout your site. This will help you be consistent with any designs you create or ask others to create.
Create a Landing Page
This is important for any site, as it will enable you to test your value proposition before going to market. You will also be able to do A/B testing and build up “buzz” around your product.
Install Tracking Software
You should always track how your pages are doing on your site and inside any software you create. You need to know which pages are popular and (if applicable) which of your pages are making money. This will help you to find pain points faster than any user survey. Use Google Analytics or equivalent software.
Create a Newsletter
With a newsletter, you’ll be able to reach your customers directly when you have important updates. Mailchimp has an API that allows integration into any type of website or software product.
Have a Content Strategy
Your content should be on message for your brand, and use a consistent tone of voice. Everything should be proofread and grammatically correct. Best practice is to have a full cycle’s worth of content prior to launch so that you can support your goal.
Speed Test
This is important as 70% of user visible speed improvements come via improving the client-side optimizations. Pagespeed and Yslow check your site’s conformance to best practices and can suggest areas of improvement.
User Test
This is important as customers drop unusable websites to go to competitors. Even testing with 5 users can find 85% of the usability issues. These websites make usability testing simple and affordable.
Turn on Site Monitoring
No matter how good your infrastructure, sites crash. A site-monitoring service like Pingdom can tell you before your customers do.
Turn On Error Reporting
No matter how much you have tested, users are going to do unexpected things to your website, which can cause site errors, including any broken links. If you get an email informing about this, you can fix this proactively.
Turn on Automated Backups
Servers die and humans make errors, but your website data is precious and backups are affordable. Your web host can generally give you an option to backup entire servers. You should also be backing up your database and media to a separate server from your main host – preferably one in a different geographic location.
Test Your Backups
Doing backups is useless if you never test them. Too many people miss this obvious step when they setup their backups.
Lock it Down
A secure site is a happy site. Create a robots.txt file to prevent unwanted snooping of your files. Get an SSL certificate to add an extra layer of protection. Make sure you have done Cross-Site Scripting and Malicious Code Injection checks, and make sure that there is a role system set up for administrative site access with a secure password system.
Test, Test and Test Again
Your development team may have only tested a subset of browsers. Use a service like Screenfly and you can make sure your site looks good in all browsers.
Be Accessible
Make sure you have a contact page and listed information that makes it easy for customers to reach you.
Check your SEO
Know what your customers are looking for, and then have your page titles show that. Make sure your site is mobile friendly, use alt-text for images, and give all pages a “meta-description”.
Make it Legal
Your site should have a Terms of Use as well as a Privacy Policy. If you don’t have one, you can go to the excellent TermsFeed site for a free starter kit.
Submit Your Sitemap
Once you are sure you are ready to go, create your sitemap.xml file and send it to all the search engines, like Google. Search engines are good at finding all your pages, but with a properly created sitemap, you can guide them to the pages you want, as well as let them know which pages are more important than others.
Go!
After you’ve completed all the previous steps, you’re ready to launch. Take down your landing page and replace it with your live site, then let all the people in your newsletter know that the floodgates are open. Blast to social media and the world, and encourage sharing. If you’ve done everything right, your site won’t crash (or at least, you’ll know right away when it does!)
There you have it! We hope you found this useful!
Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments.
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