Websites 101: Part 6 – Launching and Marketing your website

Now that you are almost done with designing your website and have also finalised your online marketing plan, it is time to finally launch your website. It’s natural that you are pretty excited to get your website in front of the entire world, but wait!

Once your website is launched, it’s a never ending journey ahead. However, it’s crucial to create the right first impression about you brand on your customers.

Here are some very important points you need to consider before your website is online.

TEST TEST & TEST

Though it may sound monotonous and mind boggling, the first and most important task is to meticulously check each and every page, all links and forms on your website and ensure that everything is working the way it should. Your website design and development company should have already done this for you. Still, to be doubly sure as it is your website and will adversely affect your brand’s reputation, you need to test it out again and be confident that all is well.

Here is a quick website test checklist

Browser testing:

Your customers might be using different browsers and your website should open and appear good in any of these browsers- Chrome, Safari, Firefox or IE.

Testing links:

Are all your navigational links and hyperlinks leading the user to the proper pages? Ensure that none of the links are broken as it provides a really poor experience to customers.

Test your Forms:

Are your contact us and enquiry forms getting submitted properly? These forms are crucial and you will be losing out on quite a lot of potential customers if these do not work the way they should.

Media testing:

Check all interactive elements as presentations, videos and any other media on your website to find out if they open easily and provide a seamless customer experience.

CONTENT CHECK

Content is the king and your next step would be proof reading all your content, line by line. Google emphasises on quality content and however stunning your website may look, if it has poor content that does not engage or provide the required information to your customers, your website will never secure high ranking. Check for grammatical and punctuation errors, spelling mistakes and more. These may appear minute things but can easily turn off a customer.

SEO FRIENDLY

As we talk about rankings, its equally important to ensure that your website is optimised for search engines. Proper headings, title tags and meta keywords, links and a proper sitemap are things you should focus on. This at the end of the day will ensure that your newly launched website ranks higher on Google!

USER TESTING

Get your website tested by actual users to get the right feedback from design as well as usability point of view. It is important that your website design impresses your users not just you and your website development company. Implementing user feedback will definitely improve the effectiveness of your website once launched.

TRACKING TOOLS

Do you have Google Analytics or any other tracking tool installed? This is important so that you have details about daily visits, average time spent on website, most visited pages, bounce rates and more. This in turn, will help you optimising and making necessary changes to your website.

BACK UP

Last but not the least, you need to take a back up of your website before kicking off the launch. You would definitely never want to lose months of hard work to a technical disaster.
Here is wishing you all the best for your website launch. Remember the first impression always matters! In case you need any help with website design and launch, we at Complete Cloud can help you!

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