This article is Part 5 of a 5 Part series shedding some light into our Web Design Process. This article explains the final preparations into publicly launching your website.
We’ve been through a rigorous process that has ensured a successful project – on budget and on schedule. Looking back:
- Part 1 explains the planning and strategy that goes into creating a website,
- Part 2 goes through the prototyping and wireframing process,
- Part 3 showcases the fruits of Parts 1 and 2 with design concepts,
- Part 4 puts the rubber to the road with the development process.
Launch Preparation
We like to do our public launches on Fridays. It gives us the chance to do a soft launch and release it to you and your team as well as any visitors that may happen across the website. If any issues occur, we can fix them in real time as well as assess the website over a weekend.
Then Monday comes along which is a prime time to issue a press release or an email to alert your family, clients, and vendors know of your new fantastic website. With a lengthy Alpha and Beta test schedule, we’re 100% positive that that email will be met with compliments to go around. All of the bugs will be squashed and the website will be pixel perfect.
Post Launch
There’s a few more things on our checklist post launch. We like to alert the search engines of your new website structure. We provide Google, Bing, and Yahoo with sitemaps that give it a full architectural analysis of your website so that the next time a crawl occurs, the engines will be sure to pick up every last piece of content on your website.
We also install Google Analytics allowing you to see who’s visiting and from where.
Ongoing Hosting & Maintenance
Many of our clients choose to retain us to host and maintain the website. With this plan (usually, $75 – $150 per month), we take care of all the technical details of your website and ensure that your site is up and running at all times. If something happens to the website, we’ll fix it. If you have a general question about how to operate the CMS, we’ll answer it. Unless there’s a design or functional change to the website, there’s nothing that you will pay for out of pocket outside of the monthly retainer. We become a part of your team.
This concludes our 5 part series on our web design and development process. We hope that this sheds some light into how we craft a website from planning to launch. Even if you’re not an O3 client or don’t intend to become an O3 client, you should use this guide as a standard of measure against the vendor you eventually choose.
