New website – what next?

New website checklist
Website just gone live, surely now it’s time for a break?

You have just completed (or your designer has) your brand new website.  The site is live and after many weeks of frantic effort you can finally take a break, sit back and admire the newly launched site, right?

Wrong!

Unfortunately, the hard work continues; in fact, some may say, it has only just begun once the site has gone live!  Any parent will tell you that the birth of a child is just the start of years of effort and commitment during which they see their loved one grow and develop.  A new website is spookily similar (though maybe with fewer sleepless nights and fewer tantrums)!

In essence, once your website has gone live you need to….

  • Drive traffic to the site to attract new visitors
  • Keep the content fresh to retain existing users and ‘convert’ new users
  • Measure site effectiveness and your marketing progress
  • Improve the site’s user experience

5 Vital Tasks for any New Website

Here is the QD Design checklist for how you can do this once your site has gone live.

  1. Use Social Media to promote the site and bring in traffic.
    Simply launching a site will not automatically bring people to it. You need to promote the site to your users, customers and potential customers through a focused and targeted strategy.  Ask yourself, where do my potential customers typically ‘hang out’ on social media.  Are you there too?
  2. Make it easy for people to share your content.
    You have created some amazing content, with insightful text and great images. social-sharingPlacing Social Media sharing buttons on pages will make it easier for people to share the site and in turn bring others to view it.
  3. Traffic logging.
    You should have set up (or the designer should have on your behalf) some form of traffic logging for the site. Of the many traffic monitors available, the biggest and probably best is Google Analyticsgoogle analytics logoNow is the time to begin querying the data it provides.  This can help you see where visitors to your site are coming from, how long they stay for, and at what time of the day the site is most popular.  If you are selling goods and services through the site you can even begin to track how far a visitor gets through the buying process before they abandon – very useful for refining your pricing, your product descriptions or your product promotion.
  4. Develop more content.
    ‘What’, I hear you say, ‘it has taken weeks to develop the new site and you want me to create even more new content’?  Yes, I’m afraid so!  website development in progress on a laptopGoogle search hugely prefers sites that are up to date and have new content over ones that are static and remain the same month in month out.  Developing new content pleases both the Google search engine as well as your audience. New content is a great reason to contact your audience and promote the site even further.
  5. Optimise the user experience.
    Use tools such as Google Webmaster and their Page Speed Insights to check how quickly the site loads and what you can do to make it even faster. You should already have checked how it works on different sized devices but go through each and every page, top to bottom, ensuring the design does truly work.  html code displayed on a laptop screenOptimize image sizes and the white space around them to ensure that great content isn’t missing from the viewer’s eye.  Create a list of improvements to work upon come the date of the first site review.

If your chosen designer doesn’t have a process for continually improving your website, are they truly the right person for the job?  There is more to web design than just devising the site itself.  At QD Design we know that the design and deployment is the (relatively) easy part, maintaining and improving the site to achieve your business aims over the long term is where the hard graft is really needed.

QD Design can assist you every step of the journey; get in touch to find out what we can do for you.

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