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On Your Marks. Get Set. Stop.

July 14th, 2016 - Posted by Jamie Thomson, Managing Director

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In the last few months we have been working on the new website and as we flew by the first estimated launch date it came to me that this resembles a lot of companies first ventures into Web to Print. They never hit the GO button.

With a new corporate website that is replacing a current site then the loss is not too severe. People could still read about RedTie products and contact us online. Of course we were missing out on some SEO juice by not being mobile friendly and all the pages needed updating (the last site was in place for 5 years and it is amazing how many pages you don’t go back to check that they are up to date).

For Web to Print storefronts, not launching is more severe, in fact you are being hit twice. You presumably are paying for the software in some way so there is a real cost happening and also no one can place an order until you are launched.

There are many reasons why things never start but today I am just going to focus on the one that has in a smaller way happened with our new website launch. It is for the perfectionists out there that will not launch a webstore until everything is perfect. Now I can’t claim I am a perfectionist in any way, but for our new website we had big plans for lots of new content as well as work in the background to make the site more modern and user and SEO friendly. We also set a very realistic target of 8 weeks to launch, well it would have been realistic if we could actually free up someone for that length of time but our real jobs got in the way.

No surprise then that we were nowhere near ready after 8 weeks and extended it by a further 4 weeks but made it a more firm launch date. That is where the first signs of trouble started, the quality of the content started to suffer as the date approached. 3 weeks into our 4 week extension and we had to stop and evaluate our position.

A lot of Web to Print sites get to this point but never restart or just plough on and never get to the launch point, but we did a full evaluation of what we had done already and what was left to do. A spreadsheet of 100s of both big and small things left to do was produced, at the rate we were going that still meant months of work. However we did find something just by standing back and looking at what we had done. We actually had more and higher quality content than our currently live site had, also most of the pages done were very close to being ready.

Back to the things to do spreadsheet with two questions in mind, what has to be done before launch? and what can we get done in 1 week? It was liberating, nearly 1/3 of the pages still to complete got cut (the new Guides section is a large part of the work in progress and another whole section of the site got cut). Even coding issues were broken down into pre and post release lists. I think we avoided two traps, we didn’t freeze in the headlights and we didn’t just plough on indefinitely.

So the new website was launched about 2 weeks ago. It’s not even close to being complete and we are adding more content to it every week. However the site is doing what it was designed to do while we work on the remaining sections.

Most people know the saying “you only get one chance to make a first impression”, of course by not launching anything you can make no impression at all, which has to be worse. Webstores can be ready before they are complete and with that in mind I am off to write the next guide.