If you launch with a big bang, you’ll almost certainly be completely underwhelmed by the public reaction to your new web site. You will have gone to a lot of time, trouble and/or money and no-one will come. The single minded belief “Build It And They Will Come” worked for Kevin Kostner, but really does not apply to the internet.

The important and significance of your statistics will be more keenly appreciated if, after creating a single page, and adding to that slowly over time, you slowly and with deliberate awareness, build your visitor numbers. You will see as you make each change, the difference that change makes reflected clearly in the stats. Look at this in contrast to loading a site up all at once in its so called finished state. You’ll have so many ways you could change it, it’ll be hard to decide what to change first and what the likely impact of the change will be.

Building out more slowly, you’ll get time to become familiar with the necessary statistics package your site uses so that the detailed reports it provides about visitors, can usefully feedback into the design process. If you launch all at once, you’ll be guessing and worse still, if your design is a complicated, graphics intensive one, it’ll be a lot harder to change.