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.

Over the past few months, Invisible Window has had the privilege of getting to know and working with the amazing staff at Oskar Blues Brewery. These fine folks craft an amazing product with a near cult-like following (especially here in Colorado). Their brand is consistent and true – just a bunch of friends brewing the beer that they’d like to drink and sharing it with everyone.

After the initial discovery meeting, it was obvious that we had to produce a site that not only held true to Oskar Blues’ brand, but helped push the company to the next level. We integrated social media accounts heavily on the new site, brought the store to the forefront, gave the beers each their own page to display their personality and “flavor”. We highlighted the new restaurants, and of course, never lost site of the importance that live music has played in Oskar Blues’ history.

We hope you enjoy the site as much as we enjoyed making it. Just a hint, the site is best viewed with a pint in your non-mouse hand. It’s winter so we suggest a Ten FIDY.

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.

We love developing web sites and WordPress projects are the most fun, but the lines between work and entertainment get even further blurred when working on a site in an area that is a hobby.  Thanks to the staff at Big Ring for all of your help putting the site together, and if you’re in the neighborhood – stop by and check out the shop.

The newly designed site gets pertinent information on the home page of the site, is much easier to navigate than the previous version, is easily updated by IPAMS’ staff, and ties into their external membership system seamlessly. As organizations and their sites change over time, often moving to a more sophisticated system is beneficial – we are glad to have had this opportunity to help IPAMS make this jump.

Pulp says “pulp is a salon for writers (and readers) working at the intersection of design, business, social sciences, and technology.”  Pulp is a site where writers can share their ideas, working drafts, and final papers with each other.  By sharing with the community, authors solicit feedback at every step of the writing process.

This site posed some unique challenges, we had to make portions of the WordPress admin available to each of the authors – and those portions needed to look and function like the rest of the site.  These challenges became rewards in the end, when we figured out the solution to each and every one of them.  Please check out the site, we’re quite proud of it.

By using WordPress, adding online registrations, and deploying a blog that integrated throughout the site, we were able to meet all of their needs and give them a site that is very easy to update.

1. They needed a site that reflected their emergence as a powerhouse in the airline industry
2. The site needed to be easy to update – allowing the site to evolve as quickly as this growing company is
3. They needed to tie their site into their salesforce.com CRM system

The site we produced was deployed on WordPress, meets all of the goals above, and was delivered on time and on budget.  Check out the site!