*

2006 / May 5th/ Launching a site successfully

For those of you keeping track, I launched Total Spore 5 days ago, and it’s been a resounding success. So far, I’ve received more than 2,500 unique visitors to the site, 14 comments, and 15 posts to what was a completely empty forum. Sure, those numbers aren’t staggering – but you’ve got to realize that was only in 5 days from a completely virgin site (there were no visitors to the domain prior to May 1). So how did I do it — and more importantly how can you repeat that kind of success on your site launches?

Be prepared

Launching a site is no easy task, especially when it involves two independent database-driven applications with pre-populated content. I wanted the site to launch at exactly midnight, as to quench my own anal-retentive tendencies. And so it did, without a hitch.

Rule #1: Have a local sandbox

Having a local setup of Apache + MySQL is absolutely crucial to the practicing web developer. You should never push something you don’t know will work or not. It should work and be tested locally, then pushed to the live site. Total Spore was completely created locally, populated with content and ready to go.

Rule #2: Have a production development site

This rule only applies if you’re launching a major upgrade (phase) or a new site. For me, I created the subdomain dev.totalspore.com, and started there. The first step was to make a MySQL dump of my local database and import it onto the production box (DreamHost). The key is here that you have a completely functioning site on the machine that will be serving the website. There were issues, of course (character encodings, and config files). But the magic part is that I did all of this without anyone seeing – on the dev box.

Rule #3: Site launches should be no more than switching the domain.

After I got this working, I did a soft launch test (on April 29). I reset all of the config files to point to totalspore.com (rather than dev.totalspore.com). After that, I went into my FTP and renamed my totalspore.com directory to totalspore.com.placeholder. Now my live site was down, so I renamed my dev.totalspore.com directory to totalspore.com. This effectively launched the site for a few minutes while I validated everything was working. After this worked, I moved everything back to where it was.

The lesson to learn here: Practice your launching. It shouldn’t be anymore difficult than renaming a directory and maybe editing one or two files. Any more than that, and you should examine your push process.

Have a marketing plan

Every site needs a plan – how are you going to build up traffic? I knew exactly how, and my timing couldn’t be better. The CSS Reboot was coming up (which actually features a lot of sites that are just ‘booting’). My marketing plan was design. I created a beautiful design that I knew would attract people. As a results, Total Spore stayed in the top 25 rated sites for the reboot for several days until mysteriously my vote count doubled, and the rating shot down like a ton of bricks (hmm… not suspicious at all). This brought in a decent amount of traffic; maybe a few hundred uniques a day. As a result, other people posted the site on their blogs – and the site has been featured in a few galleries already.

The point is, I had a way to generate the initial surge of traffic to get the site going – and it worked. Not a dime spent in advertising either, mind you. I do have a continuing plan – but I’ll wait until it works before I lay it out.

Keep it going

Of course, every great site always needs expansion and updates to gain traffic. So – stick around for a few days, I have a feeling there’s a ton of new content being added to Total Spore as we speak.

11 Comments

comments feed

  1. Gravatar
    Avinash

    May 6th | #

    I like your launch method, I use something mildly similar myself. Good read, overall. Was hoping for a bit more meat or content, but, can’t complain.

  2. Gravatar
    Veracon

    May 6th | #

    I did EXACTLY that with the relaunch of css thesis: I had a two.thesis.veracon.net domain, which was then just changed to thesis.veracon.net upon launch. Thank God for relative URLs in my templates, I didn’t have to change anything inside the actual files for the system to work.

  3. Gravatar
    Adam

    May 9th | #

    Kyle: Thanks for using the Reboot to launch TotalSpore. Fantastic work and great post.

    For what it’s worth every Reboot vote is linked not only to a cookie but also browser width and height and an IP address in the database. If the unique fingerprint created by cookie, browser dimensions, etc. of the voter don’t match up, we fall back on IP address. The same IP address can only vote up to 5 times per 24 hours per reboot. So someone would have to go to quite a lot of trouble to vote your site down — as in, like, refreshing their IP address every few minutes ;)

  4. Gravatar
    Mike Papageorge

    May 15th | #

    Rule #3: Site launches should be no more than switching the domain.

    A trick that I use is cloaking. If you are using a placeholder, you put the dev site in the actual http://www.whatever.com domain, cloaking it in your .htaccess therebye serving the placeholder to all user agents except the allowed user agent string, which gets the dev version.

    This makes launching as easy as commenting out a single line in your .htaccess, and if you happen to find a big error, you can ‘close the door’ by uncommenting the line.

    This also works great for redesigns and relaunches. You can test the redesign live ‘in-situ’, delivering the redesigned version to one user agent while everyone else gets the current site. This depends on your CMS and how it handles requests tho’.

    The .htaccess bit is like this:

    RewriteCond %!{HTTPUSERAGENT} someuseragent$
    RewriteRule ^placeholder.html [L]

  5. Gravatar
    A.H

    May 16th | #

    Now that you’ve been featured on digg, i’m sure it’s a lot more than 2,500 ;)

    A.H

  6. Gravatar
    Kyle

    May 17th | #

    Rule #4:

    Have a successful previous site to which you can rake in unique hits from.

  7. Gravatar

    [...] Launching a Successful Blog – Tips and Tricks Back in the days of ThatMatt v1.0 I wrote an article about driving traffic to one’s blog that seemed to help quite a few people. Having recently relaunched my site, I decided that sharing my tips and tricks for launching a site successfully may be of interest to some bloggers out there. Think of it as a hybrid between my old article (lost in the relaunch) and the tips offered in this article over on Warpspire. The tips are mostly targeted to those blogging outside of a hosted platform like Blogger, but some of them definitely carry over. [...]

  8. Gravatar

    [...] Warpspire » Journal » Launching a site successfully [...]

  9. Gravatar

    [...] Warspire [...]

  10. Gravatar
    Pramod Kiron

    October 18th | #

    If the site is dependent on focussed enquiries by users on Serach engines, its always bettwer to launch after completing thorough and comprehensive optimization. There would be reasonably good focussed hits whichshould convert to business within 3 Months if comprehensive Optimization is done before launch…. If interested in generating such focused traffic rather than just hits, do contact! exclhydATsify.com

  11. Gravatar
    Anonymous

    May 31st | #

    qBDHfJURErkWdYOhV

Make a Comment

don’t be afraid, it’s just text

Comments are parsed with Markdown. Basic HTML is also allowed.

Kyle Neath Warpspire is the place that web professional Kyle Neath writes about the web. More →

POWERED by FUSION

Hot Topics This Month

Feeds / Syndication

Choose your preferred method of syndication. All feeds are full-posts & ad-free. All feeds are protected under copyright and may not be redistributed without permission.

The Network

All my little projects that I leave scattered around the web. Some for profit, all for fun.