Congratulations, you’ve launched your new website! You spent time working with your internal team or an external partner to define your goals, identify your target market, and create a website built around those goals and market. And now it’s launched, so you’re done… right?
Wrong. Websites aren’t a static platform, so they’re never really done. You have may have launched the initial site or the redesign version, but there’s still work to do.
Check your metrics
If your new website is a redesign, hopefully you have some baseline metrics from your previous site. Now you can start monitoring metrics on the new site to see if the redesign accomplished your goals. Has the time people spend on the site increased? Did your site bounce rate decrease? Are you seeing fewer searches for common things on the site because of clearer navigation?
Gather feedback
During the redesign process, you may have gotten feedback from customers and strategic partners through an online survey or even just some informal discussions. Now that the site’s launched, you may want to continue gathering feedback. Ask your customers what they think of the new site. Is it meeting their needs better than before? Is there something else they would still like to see on the site?
Make adjustments
The great thing about websites is that they’re relatively easy to change along the way, if they’re built on a stable and user-friendly platform. You can add new pages, make some basic changes to the order of navigation buttons, and modify content as needed. You don’t want to be constantly redesigning or making massive changes, but you can easily tweak some aspects of your site here and there.
Make some adjustments, measure the impact of those adjustments, and then make others. Just don’t change too many things at one time or it will be difficult to determine what specific change made a positive impact on your metrics.
Create content
Now that you’ve launched a new site, you don’t want it to just sit there unchanged until your next redesign. That’s not a good strategy if you want people to find your website in a search engine. One of the best ways to regularly refresh the content on your site is through a blog. You can create useful content for your customers while also providing keywords for search engine optimization. Hopefully you created a plan for ongoing new content before launching your new site, but if you didn’t, it’s time to make that happen.
