My website was done about a week ago, for the most part.
But I was waiting to launch it.
See — it has a blog on it, and blogs need content… But I wasn’t sure of what I was going to have as the initial posts.
I was going to open my drafts folder, have a look through there, find a few pieces I could put into blog posts, edit those – then launch.
But I didn’t get around to it. Oops.
So I launched it anyways.
There is often a desire to have a “big reveal” towards the end of a website project. It isn’t necessary in many situations, and can actually be detrimental in some ways.
It isn’t detrimental to have a big launch and announcement. That is a good thing most of the time. “Come check out our new website” is something that’s often newsworthy and makes your project seem important. It’s fun to spread the word once you’ve worked hard on something.
But the desire to “wait until we launch” can often have some effects that aren’t so good for the project.
When you are starting out a website, its really helpful to get feedback on it early. Not “cool website, I really like it” and other mostly useless platitudes, but things like “this button is broken” or “I can’t find this very easily” kind of things.
Too many times these sort of fixable problems with a website are not discovered until too late – meaning after the Big Reveal.
At this time it’s probably more difficult to fix the problems and costs can be added. Maybe something major remains hidden isn’t found out until later — which would have altered the design of the website quite a bit.
The alternative to the Big reveal is just shipping something basic and them building on it afterwards. People get to use the product and you get to collect data on what they are looking at, what they are using, and what pages they choose to leave the website from. This stuff is really helpful to know and can tell you where to focus your efforts.
Waiting for the Big Reveal and just shipping a basic site and improving it can mean the difference between a crappy site and a great one. Great websites that everyone uses a lot and get a lot of traffic often have one thing in common: no one really knows they launched because it’s not that important.