Tag Archives: website

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Would you rather launch a finished and good site now and fine tune it based on user input. Or mull over the details, text, photos and every tiny details and pixel for weeks to maybe achieve that higher level or perfection?

The generic announcement

Some seem to think that having visitors look at a “maintenance” or “we are working on the site” page for weeks or even months is good. Because it tells the visitors something is coming.

True. But it may also work the other way around and make people think;

Oh, it’s not finished yet.

They move on, forget and probably never return. Often a temporary page is not engaging enough for people to bookmark it or even remember it the next day. Thus you lost a visitor and potential customer.

The premature launch

The other route many people take is to just get it out there as fast as possible. Delivering a sub-par experience for users. Incomplete information, unfinished elements in the site. Image placeholders. All the silly stuff of an unfinished product. I think this looks very unprofessional and again, pushes people away.

Well, this is crap…

And they’re gone, never to return. Not good. Especially not if you want to sell something to a broad audience.

Launch when it makes sense

I like to build a site, go over the pages and details a few times over the course of several weeks. Then launch it. Even if it’s not 100% perfect. But that way you can start selling your product or service. The site is complete, offers good information and looks quite nice. But *after* launch. It’s not finished. You still have to revisit pages and items multiple times and fine-tune them. Based on your new ideas, analytics and feedback from the visitors.

What I like to do

I like to build a site over the course of a few weeks. A page per day or something. Imagine how you would want to navigate the site as a visitor and follow that thought. Don’t abide by what the theme or plugins decide is best. It’s your site! Think of where you want certain items and elements. Take a few days to work on the theme, plugins and work out obvious bugs and quirks. After a while you end up with a good and complete site.

Also important is text, perhaps images. Write balanced paragraphs. Insert some graphics here and there. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But the gist of the text should be complete and clear. Make sure it looks well formatted.

 

And when that’s done; you launch the site.

It’s not finished. It never really is. Every few days/weeks you browse around the site and find something to improve and redo in the site until you can’t think of anything to improve. Getting a lot of questions about certain items? “where can I find this?”, “How does this work?” You probably didn’t put it on the site or if you did, people can’t find it. So figure out a way to make that part of the site easier to find or read.

And after a bunch of months, you don’t get people asking for stuff that’s on the site. You can’t think of anything to improve… Then, it’s time to build a new site.

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So after 3 years of the same crap i’ve decided to add some stuff and remove a bunch of other things.

Posts now have sharing buttons. Galleries have been removed and a Flickr gallery has been added. A bunch of useless pages have been removed and the plugins section got a big cleanup. Only relevant plugins are now listed. All unsupported plugin pages have been removed.

ALso a few internal links have been fixed. And i replaced the image plugin to use lightbox instead of shutter box. WHich should be easier to use now.

So everyone. +1 my stuff! And add me on Flickr (arnandegans) and Google+ (Arnan de Gans).

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Over the past days i migrated my websites to another webhost. Somewhere today or tomorrow, depending on when the DNS servers will be updated, meandmymac.net as well as some other domains of me are being moved to a new webhost. Service could be was interrupted for a few days.

Another more pressing impact will be that the forum will no longer be available at the forum.at.meandmymac.net Since a dot in the subdomain is apparently evil :) .

The new address will simply by meandmymac.net/forum/ Plugins will be updated accordingly and i’ll try to set up some redirect from the old address.

Some posts on the forum might be lost in the transition. I expect not too much trouble though as everything is prepared and should go smoothly.

As an update, the transition took ages because something kept going wrong at the chosen webhost. I have since solved the issue by moving to yet another webhost. This seemed the fastest solution!