Launching a site is something to get excited about.  We’ve launched hundreds over the years and to this day seeing a new site linked to a URL still gets us stoked.  Launching a site, though is like opening a brick and mortar store for business.  Yes a lot of work has gone to get you to that point.  Yes you are now “open for business”.  And yes, everyone that got the business or site to that point should be proud of seeing their hard work available to the world.  Very few business owners, likely even fewer successful business owners, would open the doors to a traditional store and just assume that customers would pour in.  They would market, raise awareness, sponsor events, do promotions, collect information from their customers and try to get customers to tell their friends about the new establishment.  Often times for online endeavors, this step is forgotten, overlooked, ignored.  The reasons are wide ranging, we don’t have the: time, money, resources, knowledge, ability, etc.  I would ask this though.  Do you have the time to let this business fail?  If it fails, you flushed the money to develop your site down the drain, are you ok doing that?  If your answer to either of those questions is no, read on.

Glad you made it this far.

So your site has been launched, what now?

SEO

Search Engine Optimization should be an on-going part of any site.  Good SEO can not happen with out utilizing tools such as Google Analytics to tell site owners how visitors (and search engines) are interacting with your site and its pages.  Analyze the data and create logical business decision as to what pages need help and where your site is falling short.  There are a plethora of tools out there that will help you find target key words and phrases.  Time spent here every week will pay off big in the traffic arena.

Social Networking

Social networking is one of the fastest growing sectors on the Internet today.  Much has been written about how to use tools like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc as ways to connect with your market – heck we even wrote an article ourselves.  These powerful tools allow you to connect with your audience quickly and in a less formal manner than available through a traditional website.  These networks can drive traffic and SALES to your company – in June of this year, Dell announced it had earned $3 million in revenue from using Twitter.  New tools from Facebook allow people visiting your site to easily share any page with their friends.  Stay on top of developments in this area – it’s likely to become a bigger and bigger part of how traffic is driven to sites.

Blog

A blog helps out a website in so many ways that we could write multiple blog posts just about that topic.  In a nutshell though, here are five reasons why every site needs to include a blog component.

1. Search engines like sites that are updated frequently – blogs provide an easy way of updating your site.
2. Anything can be a blog post – got a cool photo from a customer – boom you got a blog post – get written up in the newspaper – bang blog post
3. Blogs can start a conversation with your customer base – where traditional sites only talk to customers
4. Blogs offer a way to show your customers your “fun side” – you don’t have to be as “spit shined” on a blog as you need to be on your site
5. People will keep coming back if you keep having things to tell them

Email Marketing

Ad agencies have been prompting clients to do “mailers” for decades now – email marketing is just a logical extension of that practice – only about a bazillion times better.  Here are a few of the reasons why:

1. Good email marketing starts with an organically grown list – customers and contacts that WANT to hear from you
2. There is no postage with email (that’s a 44¢ savings per email)
3. email marketing is measurable – you can calculate an actual ROI from it – do that with a mailer.
4. email marketing software manages your list for you – people opt in and occasionally opt out
5. email marketing can be passed on vitally – i doubt anyone often resend something they get in snail mail to a friend
6. email is green – green is cool keen

Promotions/Contests

This is probably one of the most creative areas that a site owner can use to market their site.

Do you make something? Offer a service?  Create a contest where customers submit their stories of using your product – award the winner with your product and create a blog post about them.

Have a new product coming out? You could let your customers help you name it – either through an online contest or a poll.

Want to drive random traffic?  Use Twitter to announce a give away – hide the registration for the giveaway on your site.  I mean who doesn’t like iTunes gift cards?

Um ok…

This post could go on forever, the possibilities of what can be done to market a site are virtually endless.  The point here is be creative, take the time, and spend the money to make your site successful – it deserves a fighting chance.

If this is all too much but you think it’s a good idea – we can help out too, give us a call we’d love to help out.

There are a plethora of great tools available to web developers that provide statistics on how a site is indexed and what kinds of traffic a site is getting.  Google Analytics has become the standard for tracking how users interact with a site.  If this tool is running on the original site, you’re golden.  If not, I would highly suggest installing it on the “old” site as a first step of developing the new site.  The data gathered from Google Analytics during the development period will ultimately drive which urls from the original site will be redirected to the new site.

We develop 99% of our sites with WordPress as the CMS.  The concepts we’re about to cover will work regardless of how you develop your site but this article assumes you’re using WordPress.  You’ll want a plugin to make this a bit easier.  Go download and install Redirection now, I’ll wait.  No really, I’ll wait, go ahead, do it now.

You’re back, good.

Now let’s jump ahead and assume that you’re ready to launch your newly re-designed site.  Log in to Google Analytics and go down to the Content Overview section of your dashboard (lower right).

Click on View Report – you’ll be taken to an overview page – at the bottom of that page, you’ll find a link that says view full report – click on that link to view the details.

From this content overview page, you can export the most popular links on your site to a file (.csv, .xls, .txt, etc.).  This file will be the raw data we’ll use to set up the redirects for the newly designed site.  Sort the file and identify all of the links that you wish to re-direct to your new site.  Log into your WordPress admin and click on the Tools sidebar then click on redirection.

This screen will allow you to enter in the original url (from the old site) and the destination url (what page you want to redirect to on the new site).  And the option to make it a 301, 307, or 307 redirect.  Additionally you can use regular expressions to avoid having to create every single redirection manually (check out the redirection site for more details).

The redirection site has many tutorials on how to use the plugin, how to write regular expressions and how to use it with other modules – it is definitely worth checking out if this article’s peaked your interest.

These simple steps will keep a newly launched site from dipping in rank after a re-design.

Today I had the privilege of attending Wordcamp Denver today at the Denver Art Museum, a conference put on by Automatic “…created for enthusiasts, users, developers, designers, and fans of WordPress in the Denver/Boulder area.”  It would be a mild understatement to say that the amount of knowledge dissipated today was colossal.  I can not wait to put some of the things that I learned into practice on new projects.

Invisible Window has been committed to developing on WordPress for a few years now, but today opened up a whole new world of possibilities.  The most noteworthy sessions were:

1. Matt Mullenweg (Automattic) – founding developer of WordPress.
   Matt spoke on the future of WordPress, presented some amazing themes and plugins, and spoke of some new projects on the horizon that the WordPress community can look forward to (bbpress, wordpress.tv, Buddy Press, etc)
2. Ben Huh (Pet Holdings) – Ben Huh is the CEO of the company that runs FAIL Blog, I Can Has Cheezburger?, GraphJam and other Interweb time sinks.
   Ben spoke on how to scale a company using WordPress and other ‘pluggable’ vendors/providers to grow a business (he was quite entertaining to listen to, and coined a great acronym – MPH – Mr. Potato Head – essentially you can put something in, it may look ugly but it works – you can pull something out – it may be ugly but it works)
3. Alex King (Crowd Favorite) – WordPress as a CMS using the Carrington Theme FrameworkAlex presented an amazing CMS framework theme for developers called Carrington.  Carrington offers a very high degree of customization via a sophisticated file structure (Invisible Window will definitely be using this heavily in the future)
4. Jake Spurlock (Petomundo!) – Developing with BuddyPress
   Jake spoke on Buddy Press (a social network which runs on a WordPressMU installation).  I think we will be using this to re-deploy The Chain Ring.

This was a totally amazing experience (especially if you’re a geek like me ) and I am really looking forward to putting this knowledge out there on projects.  Contact us and we’ll get going on your next great idea.

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For more information visit: www.coolclimatejobs.com (then check it out on your iPhone!).

Invisible Window has been developing sites using WordPress as a CMS for some time now, and it’s is a great system. WordPress sites allow the site owner to easily make updates to content and imagery, and WordPress has many features that allow better organic search engine results – these new features in this release make this great system even better.

If you have a site running a previous version of WordPress (unless you’ve already contacted us for an upgrade, you do), shoot us an email (hello at invisible window dot com) and we can set up a time to upgrade your site so you too can be blown away by these new features.

Check it out

You will need to signup for a Google Maps API Key to use this plugin on your site.

== Current Version ==
Google Mapper 1.0 – 2007-12-04
Download Zip: Google Mapper Plugin v 1.0

== Installation ==

1. Upload `google-mapper` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Enter your Google Maps API key and any optional default values
4. Place < ?php if(function_exists('gm_show_map')) gm_show_map(); ?> in your templates

== To Do ==

1. Finalize Upgrade Script
2. Allow setting streets, topo, hybrid view
3. Allow setting for default map display size

== Donate ==
PayPal: Like this plugin? Want to see it developed further? donate here.

In addition to the core library, there are a host of jQuery plugins available each enhancing jQuery’s features. Here are 10 I think you should take a look at.

1. jQuery Dimensions Plugin – The dimensions plugin extends jQuery with dimension centric methods. It has been rigorously tested and gives accurate results cross-browser. Methods like width and height are extended by dimensions to enable you to get the width and height of both the window and the document. Methods like offset and position help you find the coordinates of an element on your page. (http://brandonaaron.net/docs/dimensions/)
2. jQuery Calculation Plugin – This plugin greatly expands the ability to retrieve and set values in forms beyond jQuery’s standard val() method by allowing you to interact with all types of form field elements. (http://www.pengoworks.com/workshop/jquery/calculation.plugin.htm)
3. jQuery Tablesorter Plugin – Tablesorter is a jQuery plugin for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes. Tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell. (http://tablesorter.com/docs/)
4. jQuery Tooltip Plugin – Display a customized tooltip instead of the default one for every selected element. The tooltip behaviour mimics the default one, but lets you style the tooltip and specify the delay before displaying it. In addition, it displays the href value, if it is available. (http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-tooltip/)
5. jQuery Simple Star Rating Plugin – This is a jQuery plugin for star rating systems much like Netflix or GMail. (http://examples.learningjquery.com/rating/)
6. jQuery Stylesheet Switcher – The stylesheet switcher allows your visitors to choose which stylesheet they would like to view your site with. It uses cookies so that when they return to the site or visit a different page they still get their chosen stylesheet. (http://www.kelvinluck.com/article/switch-stylesheets-with-jquery)
7. ThickBox – ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the jQuery library. Its function is to show a single image, multiple images, inline content, iframed content, or content served through AJAX in a hybrid modal. (http://jquery.com/demo/thickbox/)
8. jQuery date picker plugin – A flexible unobtrusive calendar component for jQuery. (http://kelvinluck.com/assets/jquery/datePicker/v2/demo/)
9. jQuery Tabs Plugin – Quickly, and easily, build an accessible and unobtrusive tabbed navigation interface for your web site. Provides predefined (slide and/or fade) and custom animations on tab selection, callback on tab selection, autoheight, bookmarking. Use with the History/Remote plugin to fix the back button. (http://www.stilbuero.de/2006/11/05/tabs-version-2/)
10. pager jQuery plug-in – Unobtrusively paginate large pieces of content into smaller chunks. (http://rikrikrik.com/jquery/pager/)

This is by no means an exhaustive list and the plugins listed are in no particular order. I feel they should be enough to show the possibilities that open up when you include jQuery into your development and wet your appetite for more.

Happy surfing!