This is the fifth post in our series on the process of building an effective website! We’ll be explaining the entire process in great detail so you’ll know what to expect when you work with Indelible. If you’re a web developer or a marketing professional, borrow what works for you and keep us in mind when you need some staff augmentation :-). Our process involves several phases:
- The Discovery Meeting
- Writing the Plan
- The Design Phase
- The Build Phase
- Site Launch (This Post)
The most exciting part of any website project is when launch time arrives. Despite the temptation to launch it and call it a day, always remember that launching is really the first step to the broader goal of perfecting your digital presence. Think of the plan, design, and build phases as the steps to building a home. Moving in and living in it are ongoing (yes, our co-founder Mike still has boxes to unpack from Feb 2020!).
Soft Launch
Whenever possible we like to perform a soft launch – that is, a launch where we’re not currently driving a ton of traffic to the site. Generally speaking, we will pause ads and stop promoting the site on social media for a few days to a week. Despite the fact that we’ve performed rigorous testing in the development phase, we’re going to give it more testing on the production server just to be sure. Once our tests are clear and the key stakeholders give the green light, we can move on to the “true launch,” or “liftoff” as we like to call it.
Liftoff
Launch Announcement
Our clients do amazing things, and we love to tell the world about them. When the site is ready, Indelible will make a big announcement on our social media, and your organization likely will too! We tell the world that the site is here and why they will love it.
The next part of the announcement is that, in most cases, we’ll write a case study about your site and pay to promote it on social media. We get to show off our skills a bit, and your organization gets some traffic!
Drive Traffic
Of course, that’s just the first step to driving traffic. For a true liftoff that will get your site to the moon, we’ll need to establish ongoing methods for driving traffic to the site. There are a few tried and true ways to make this happen: ongoing SEO and pay-per-click advertising.
Search Engine Optimization
The technical part of SEO has already been taken care of during the build, but ongoing content creation and building backlinks are key strategies to generating organic traffic. At the time of this writing work we did creating content for Crown Point Builders in 2020 & 2021 has paid off big time with top of Google results for searches like “how do I build a home in Vermont?” It certainly didn’t happen overnight, but now they own that space!
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
PPC allows you to buy top slots on search engines and display spots on websites so that your target market is more likely to find you. This creates traffic significantly faster than ads, but once you stop spending the money the traffic typically dries up. We recommend a combined effort of PPC (especially in the early days) to drive traffic, and ongoing SEO to invest in long-term growth.
Site Maintenance
Just like your beautiful new home will need ongoing maintenance to stay in top shape, your new website will too. Whether it’s updating the software running on the site, changing some of the design elements to match modern trends, or even adding features, a healthy website will continue to grow and evolve.
We’re big on the idea of testing. Think about how many times you might rearrange a room in the years after moving into your home. Why does this happen? Subconsciously, we’re testing for what works well. In the same way, we’ll want to monitor key metrics on your site to see how users are responding – is it working? could it be better? For every change, we’ll watch that data and continue on toward perfection.