Launch is hard.
For the launch of Ruby Skye P.I. on Monday, I made some mistakes. And then there were the usual unforeseeable obstacles: inaccessible passwords, crashing servers, FTP issues. Throw in the unpredictability of how long it take the DNS to do it’s thing and the fact that I’m tossing around terms like DNS and FTP and you’ve got a big fat mess at 3 a.m.
On Monday, there was a frantic period when we were madly directing people to watch Chapter 1 on Vimeo.
Then the site went live, I blurted out the great news to Twitter just in time for the server to crash. Twice.
That’s about when I decided to take my furiousity walk.
In the end, we got rubyskyepi.com online four hours later than we’d hope. It was a hairy day.
Next morning, I made myself a list of rules for launching new web endeavours. When next time rolls around, please remind me.
- Launch is the coming together of three forces: the site, the host and the content. Content is all the posts, pictures, video and games. The site is the design and layout which holds the content. The host is the server that the site and it’s content live on. Next time, I’m going to make sure everyone understands the process from everyone else’s perspective.
- Public launch on the same day the site goes live? Never again. You kind of want to because it’s all new and shiny and you just want to go ta da. With Ruby, we’ve had our production blog sitting at rubyskyepi.com since July. We’ve been getting great numbers. I thought that as soon as we transferred over to the new site, we had to announce it. Really, why? So what if a bunch of regular readers came and played around and enjoyed the space before we yelled about it from the roof tops. It was just lack of imagination that prevented me from seeing it that way. It would have been better to quietly make the change and have some time to tweak and fiddle. Some people would have found it and taken a look around, but that would have been fine. And we could have invited the world in when we had everything fluffed and shined to gleaming.
- Launching at a specific time is a great way to drive numbers. But you just can’t do it with a website. You can do it with a video but it’s just stupid to even attempt to get your site up at an exact hour. You upload the web design to the host site and then you set the DNS to the new address. How long the DNS takes to switch over is completely unpredictable. They say up to 24 hours but in my experience it’s usually more like a couple. (Please excuse me if anything I said in this paragraph is wrong, I don’t know what any of those words mean and my understanding of all of this is sketchy at best.)
- Do not launch on a Monday (which I wouldn’t have done, had I spent more time talking to my developer who knows things I don’t even know that I don’t know). That just means being up all night Sunday when you can’t reach the one person in the world who has the key piece of information that you can’t launch without. Mondays are good for traffic, but you’ll have good Monday traffic next week and the week after. Launch mid-week and take the weekend before to sleep. Because once your site’s live, you’ll never want to leave Google Analytic’s side again.
Scott
Hi! Great post. Everything you said is absolutely true.
We’re conditioned by well orchestrated movie, TV and product launches that the public unveiling should be an event – but if your website is immediately public, shouldn’t you make a big deal? It’s hard to wait!
I also think most sane people understand that things like websites go wrong sometimes.
Drinks on me next time I see you! Congrats on the launch, hiccups and all!
Liz Hover
Hey Jill – the secret of getting your site right before launch? Test with a select group far in advance of your public launch.
But … no amount of testing will account for how a site responds once you launch to the masses.
We launched the National Screen Institute website in beta and I used the whole process to start my blog in 2008.
Just looked through the archives and found this post: https://web.archive.org/web/20150328031107/http://www.lizhover.com:80/2008/03/why-you-should-launch-a-new-website-in-beta/
One thing I heard loud and clear from our tech people was test, test, test.
Ruby’s site looks delicious BTW. Congrats on getting there in the end 🙂
admin
Thanks Scott!! …how many drinks?
Scott
Ha! As many as you can choke down.