Slow Launch Leads to Simple Layout

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If you decide to launch your web site slowly, one page at a time over a period of weeks rather than in one Big Bang - there are certain advantages.

Inevitably, because the single page of your new site will be created fairly quickly, it is unlikely to be loaded with animated graphics, flash animations and other visual trinkets. There is a time and place for those things, but rarely are they appropriate on a newly launched web site.

Pointless, purely decorative animations are usually just a manifestation of vanity publishing. The site owner or the web designer feels that the cooler his home page, the cooler he is.

There is nothing cool about having a home page so urban it looks suspiciously like a mobile phone ad. There is nothing cool about a home page so laid back no-one can work out what to click.

By taking the quick one page launch route, you neatly avoid the temptation to get involved with any of this. In turn this will help you concentrate on providing original and useful content for your visitors. Now that is cool.

Handle Criticism And Improve Your Site

If you decide to launch your web site slowly, one page at a time over a period of weeks rather than in one Big Bang - there are certain advantages.

If you launch with a big bang, you’ll be so excited about it, you’ll get all your friends and relatives to take a look. In between the positive feedback from your mother and your best friend you’ll get some negative feedback you didn’t expect from other people.

• “We couldn’t easily find your phone number”,
• “the colours clash a bit don’t they”,
• “it’s all right but I had to scroll to see the bottom”,
• did you test it in Firefox because I that page with all the photos on it was pretty mangled”.

If you have just spent a lot of money on the site, you’ll feel like you’re stuck with something you can’t change and adapt to feedback from your customers and from your stats package.

Of course, you’ll only get feedback in proportion to the amount of your site that exists at any one time. So if you iron out all design issues on a couple of pages by launching slowly, that’ll be a good place from which to start creating extra pages.