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Get Your Website Launched!
There are many elements in a website design project. Elements may include the overall strategy, the site map, site contents, design, coding, search engine optimization (SEO) and additional functionality. With so much to track, it's easy to let the website design project roll on forever. It's tempting to keep tinkering and adjusting the various components until they're perfect. But you should remember that while you're editing the website, it stays on your designer's temporary server for testing or on your desktop — and never gets launched.
This is counter-productive.
While it's important to launch a website that looks professional, it's also perfectly OK to launch a site that isn't 100% finished.
Launching a site that's not perfect can actually help you! Once your site is live, you'll be able to:
- Get Feedback: While you're working on your website, you're working in a vacuum. Even if you're working with a designer and testing it out with some of your clients, you'll only be getting input from a few people.
Once you launch it you'll be able to ask all of your visitors for their impressions and feedback on your site. Improving it with this extra help will really speed up the process and the site will be improved much more quickly.
- Get Found: The faster you can launch something, the better. The search engines won't find you the instant your site is up! If you launch it you'll get more time to work on the site while giving the search engines more time to find you.
Once the search engines find your site they will start referring business your way. And that's the whole reason you're creating this website, right?
- Refer Clients To It: Imagine if you could spend less time trying to make sales. One way is to refer clients and prospects to your website. If you put your 80% complete website online, you can send those inquiries to your site instead of spending time answering questions. And that time will be freed up for you to work on your website. It winds up being a win-win for everyone.
So, if you have a website that's partially done, get it up online now!
Go ahead and launch the site, even if there are whole pieces missing. Say you still have to finish spicing up the copy, or have a few more pages to add. Even if you haven't hooked up your newsletter subscription or your shopping cart yet, just go ahead and launch the site — it will help you bring in more business while you're finishing your website project. A website that's out in the world does you a lot more good than a website that's sitting on your computer, stuck in development.
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About the Author
| Erin Ferree is a branding coach, design genius and strategic thinker. She's been told that her right-brain, left-brain combination of creativity and logic is hard to come by... and that it's what small business owners need to be successful. She loves connecting the dots between passion and profit, mixing strategy and inspiration and shaking things up.
She deeply enjoys working with entrepreneurs who want to help more people and look good doing it. Who want all of their branding and marketing to make sense and speak to their ideal clients. And who want an open, honest, inviting brand with integrity - instead of using icky, pushy, sleazy marketing tactics and trickery.
She's branded over 450 small businesses in the last 10 years. She's been published in so many books and periodicals that she stopped counting. She's shared stages with some awesome people - like Michele PW, Linda Hollander, Lisa Cherney, Sheri McConnell and Kelly O'neil.
She also enjoys hugging her corgi-dog Stanley, cooking and throwing parties so her friends can enjoy them.
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Small business branding, brand coaching and logo design articles at http://www.brandstyledesign.com
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