General George Patton is credited with the quote “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” In the world of the internet, the same thing is true with websites. Some of the most successful sites would be considered half-baked today if you looked at them in the internet archive. These sites usually succeeded because they were the first to market with a product or service, or because they became popular in spite of crude graphics and layout. While you may be anxious to hit the ground running with your site, the biggest challenge to liftoff may be inside your own office.
In many cases we run across clients who take months, or even a year, to put out a site that could have been ready in three weeks. This is most often the case in corporate environments where every aspect of the site has to be dissected in meetings, conference calls, and special committees. Unfortunately, large groups of in-house players are often completely unaware of how websites should be presented on the internet. While it is important to state the company’s offerings and goals to the general public, the “website design” becomes a political football for people in the office. Arguments break out over minor details that a customer won’t even notice, and important messaging gets lost in the shuffle. As a result, the finished product is a conglomeration of elements with no central theme, or a collection of information that does not adequately serve the site visitor’s needs. Any competitive advantage the site may have had has by this point been watered down in a series of compromises.
This is not to say that you should put out an unfinished website or one with broken elements. Rather, you should have the minimum number of pages necessary for a site launch. The actual “grand opening” of a new site could be months away, but your web presence should be established as quickly as possible. For one reason, search engines like Google consider “site age” to be a factor in web rankings, and the structure of your site should be read by search engine robots immediately. If you don’t already know, the process of getting listed in search engines takes weeks or months, and the clock starts running when the site actually gets read by the search engine. In the interim, you can buy some traffic and use tools like Google Analytics to see how people interact with your site’s content, so you can make corrections in advance of a major online marketing push. Finally, a “soft launch” of a site will invariably reveal problems in the shopping process, security certificate, image presentation, browser compatibility, and load time.
If you build your website structure with growth in mind, you can roll it out in phases. Staging the site launch also allows for less time for approval among larger business footprints, and prevents the delays that take place when a VP or CTO has to sign off on the site before it goes live. Breaking a site launch into pieces also helps when you have an in-house legal department that needs to approve pages prior to launch. It also is a good way to cut through office politics by getting approval on “the website” in its launch phase, allowing you to quietly expand the site as more content becomes available.
In the world of the internet, there is no such thing as a “finished” website. In fact, you may lose your position in search engine results if changes become infrequent and the site gets “stale.” Search engines, like people, have short attention spans, so it pays to keep sites updated with extra content, product suggestions, testimonials, instructions, FAQs, and news updates. The relative ease of making changes to websites allows for frequent additions to content, and a growing website allows for greater flexibility when it comes to adding new or improved product and service offerings.
Getting your site out onto the web as quickly as possible should be an imperative for just about anyone who has something to sell, or information to convey. There is still a widely held notion that you are going to get instant traffic and sales when your website goes up. In reality, traffic trickles in gradually unless you have some kind of offline marketing push that gets people coming to the website. Even then, you don’t want to have your marketing initiative launch simultaneously with an untested site, or you will risk a very public failure. Quietly launching the site and making real time corrections is the key to solid success when you get noticed by the search engines and the general public. In real life and on the World Wide Web, there is no better time than the present to get started on the long road to achievement.
