I launched my new site, now what?

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I launched my new site, now what?

We work with a lot of companies and organizations at Headspace. For many of them, the process goes like this:

  • find a budget to re-design the website
  • put out an RFP
  • hire the right company for the job
  • Work with said company and launch the site
  • Ignore the relaunched website for another 3-5 years until they get another budget to re-design.

Sadly, this is the way economics work for these organizations.

But there's a better way.

Instead of blowing your entire budget on just the website relaunch, spend 50% of it. Then spread the other 50% evenly across the next 3 years so that by the time the 3 years are up, your website isn't in too bad shape.

This leaves many website owners left wondering: What the heck do I do after the website is launched? Here's a check list:

Measure

There's a ton of stuff you can be measuring every day or every week. Google Analytics contains a wealth of information about your website traffic. Don't just focus on traffic alone, although this is an indicator of how your website is performing. Look at where your visitors are coming from; Is it mostly local traffic or are you getting a lot of national or international visitors? Go deeper down the rabbit hole, how are these non-local visitors finding our about you?

Usage

What browsers and devices they are using? If 60% of your visitors use a particular browser or mobile device, test your website on it and see what how it performs. If it's not great, then that's where you could be spending some money in optimizing for your current visitors.

Conversion

Conversion rate is always a big indicator of how your site is performing. Do 3% of your visitors complete the desired action (i.e.: fill out a contact form, download a file, complete a transaction etc.)? How could you bump that to 4%, 5%, 10%? Maybe you could try some A/B testing to see if a different headline or image would increase conversion.

Traffic Sources

How do people find out about your site? Are they clicking from a referring website, or inputting the URL directly in their address bar? Are they finding you through search engines? If so, which one and what keywords are they using? By getting more quality websites to link to yours it will increase your ranking in search engines, and learning which keywords visitors used to find you and what page they landed on from Google will give you a lot of indication as to which pages your should be further optimizing.

Content Strategy

Content should be a part of your daily life, or at least weekly. Creating quality content for your site, optimizing the pages it sits on, and then promoting the content will all holistically come together to improve your user-experience, search engine rankings and ultimately your business goals.

Social

You can monitor your website and brand on social websites by using tools like AddThis or Hootsuite which tell you how/where/what pages people shared on social media.

User-Testing

Keep testing your website with real users, either conducting tests in-house with paid users or with a tool like User-Testing.com . Is there an aspect of your website that's confusing? Are certain goals not being met? Or has a new technology come out that can improve one of your key performance indicators?

The point of all this is, don't sit on your website expecting that the money you put into rebuilding it a year ago should last another 2 or 3 years. That relaunch was a starting point to learn from. Investing in a lower spend over a longer period of time will yield better results.

A good example of this is one of our clients, NCCDH. They hired us in 2011 to re-design their website and help them plan and build an online community, but they didn't stop there; They invest every month in monitoring their website, allowing us to come up with better ways to solve their problems and make the site that much better. Of course, a company doesn't need to invest their spend in outside firms - if they have the budget to hire internally then great. Having an in-house resource can be very helpful, but either way the point is to keep doing something.

Having solid metrics and tangible, measurable improvement surely helps in getting that extra funding in another 5 years.