The Launch Party

Although I am not physically present in client offices on the day that we launch their website, the way I envision things, the entire team toasts the bubbly and congratulations pass around for a website well done. The designer and developer bask in the glow of their thank you emails. The marketing team ends the day on a high note, and everyone goes home with a relieved smile and a slight headache.

So what happens the next day? Don’t let your website lose momentum – invite your entire team to participate in getting your new site jump-started, with these three steps:

1. Coordinating Your Pit Crew

Are you taking advantage of all the resources around you? Identify the people most interested in the success of the website, and try to involve each of them in some way. Keep each member of your team motivated with lots of updates and occasional homework.

2. Getting Up To Speed with Content Creation

Every business has a different marketing strategy – share yours with your entire team so they can support the company’s online goals as they participate in content creation. The heroes of your content marketing efforts could come from anywhere: from leaders with the most product and customer knowledge; to the all-important company photographer(s); to prolific writers and other creatives.

• For management, suggest that they write a new blog post, or rewrite a website landing page.
• For less experienced staff, consider assigning them the important role of photo librarian. Organizing and updating the marketing photo library makes the job of content creators and writers easier, and also gives new-hires better understanding of the company’s marketing efforts.

What are your customers most common questions and concerns? Fuel their interest in your new content by focusing on customer needs first. Whether you plan to update your site once a month, or even twice a year, plan ahead so that you have time to brainstorm for catchy titles and research engaging visuals, and to get committee approval if needed.

3. Getting Under the Hood with Training

Is the website set up to support your ongoing marketing efforts? WordPress and other tools may already be configured. Website backups and claiming of various Google properties may not be. Ask your launch team to explain what has been set up, and if they have any simple tips to boost website performance.

Once your website team completes your site, log in and get familiarized with the content creation toolset. Start by getting trained on how to add and manage content, from whatever training source you prefer. As a web designer I include personalized training sessions soon after launch. I find out what tasks clients wants to handle internally, and help outsource those that they don’t. As new people get involved, occasional skills tune-ups will build their confidence and effectiveness.

Wash, Rinse and Repeat!

So, you have assembled your team, started creating content and scheduled training. Blog posts are being started, by your top customer service and sales people. And cameras are getting warmed up for upcoming tradeshows. At whatever speed you are making progress, at least you are getting started! With the right mix of people involved, your website will be headed for the winners circle.

First, Check Your Local Rep

What happens when someone “Googles you” or your company? Control what you can by claiming your Google Places listing. You can edit the details of the listing, add images and links your YouTube videos. To confirm that you are authorized to edit the map listing, Google will send a postcard to your address with a PIN number on it. After entering the PIN into your Google Places account your enhancements will start showing up on Google Maps.

Take The Vanilla Out of Your Google Analytics

Yes, Google Analytics is free, but to get meaningful insights a few things should be configured. Hopefully there is already Google Analytics tracking code installed on the old site. If not, it may be worthwhile to install it on the old site. In the time leading up to the launch of the new site some decent traffic data could accumulate.

Benchmark the performance of the old site by noting the site’s past general and specific keyword traffic. A year out from now when you are studying analytics, having the legacy benchmark data available will allow for more meaningful analysis and allow you to more easily judge ROI for the new site.

Set up groups of Conversion Goals. Goals can be configured in a variety of ways to track the important conversions on your site. Set up a bunch, they’ll help you judge how engaged your visitors are with your content, and will especially pay off when you are analyzing which keywords are most valuable. One of the simplest approaches is to set a goal for important pages on your site like product-specific pages, specific service pages, and contact forms.

Establishing a few Custom Segments will also help you gain more accurate insights than looking at all visitor data at once. For instance if you only do business in the State of California then why look at visitor statistics for the entire world? Create a segment that includes just your service area. Try one where all “branded” keyword traffic is factored out, or where a geographic region is isolated,

301 Redirects

Creating 301 redirects takes anyone who tries to visit your old site URLs right to the new site. With the redirect code in place, visitors who try to visit “mysite.com/oldpage.html/” get instantly transported to “mysite.com/newcontent/” – nifty! Don’t redirect all pages to your new homepage. Redirect your old About/Company section to the corresponding new one, same with Contact Us and all the rest.

Get To Know Google Webmaster Tools

There are too many great features within Google Webmaster Tools to mention here, but the first thing to do is submit your sitemap. Your website will have one or more sitemap addresses, which you’ll want to submit to your Google Webmaster Tools sitemaps area. Check later to make sure the sitemap’s status is green. Once this is done Google will index the new site faster and your new pages will appear in the search results instead of your site’s older “cached” pages. While you’re at it, go ahead and sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools and submit you sitemap there. Bing supposedly drives decent traffic so may as well get indexed there too.

Do The Robot

Create a “robots.txt” file to disallow specific folders. Also use it to allow or disallow your site’s images to be indexed by Google Images. Also useful to make sure your wp-admin page does not show up in Google’s index.

Get Visitors Back On Track WIth A Helpful 404

Even the most vigilant website manager will still occasionally find visitors encountering a “page not found” error on their site, also known as a 404 error. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools diagnostics can both help pinpoint problems. When the inevitable happens and the error page does display, you’ll wish you had created a branded 404 error page. Make sure visitors know that you care about their experience on your site by including a sympathetic “oops” or “we’re sorry” or whatever message is most appropriate for your brand. And include some helpful links to help them find what they’re looking for.

Got Uptime Monitoring?

Signing up for mobile website hosting downtime alerts from a service like Pingdom will let you know if your site goes down, and for how long.

The day after launch, check to make sure that Google Analytics data is accumulating normally. Now go get back to your vacation! Need some reading material? Go study some analytics tips from the GA sage Avinash, at his blog.

Have some website launch tips for us? Please share them in the comments below!