From the beginning of a website project, we’re thinking about the experience of our clients’ external audiences — all the people who will explore the site and find what they’re looking for, leaving with information and changed impressions of an organization. That’s why your website exists, after all. We work closely for months with our clients, gathering requirements, mapping, designing, reviewing, writing code, helping with content and guiding them toward the moment of truth — launch.

But then what? You drive the car off the lot, take the baby home for the first time — you’re on your own.

You, the site owners/managers/editors, are the ones responsible for driving and feeding the site on a daily basis. We actually spend a lot of time thinking about this. Too many times, the website admin experience is burdensome. This concept goes well beyond “maintenance” to us. A website’s backend environment, including the content management system (CMS), should be as intuitive and user-friendly as its front end. Your site shouldn’t be a beater that only you know how to put into gear. OK, car metaphors over.

We plan for launch from the very beginning of a website project. We build customized, thoughtful tools and trainings well before we hand over the keys (OK, I lied). Our approach is designed to minimize friction and empower your internal teams with the knowledge and tools they need to effectively manage the digital experience.

The Elements of a Successful Launch and Post-Launch

Launch day is exciting — by now we’ve been there with you at every step, starting the launch planning weeks prior — making sure things go live properly to reduce disruption. This is a pivotal moment. Our minds all along have been on what will happen later that day, that week, next month, and a year or more after launch.

A website is a living thing. You will require code updates. Sometimes a page won’t render and will need troubleshooting. There will be bugs, issues, and emerging requirements as your organization changes and you need new types of content on the site we didn’t plan for.

But after years of doing this, we know that there are a lot of things we can plan for and ways to make sure you’re successful and everyone is happy. We can think of those in a few different categories: Training, Tools, and Tracking.

Training

Our post-launch support framework places a strong emphasis on training, recognizing it as the foundation upon which the confidence and competence of internal teams are built. We design these trainings specific to your team. Nothing is boilerplate. The examples you see in our walkthroughs are with your actual CMS. We want to make sure that every aspect of the site management process is intuitive, efficient, and perfectly aligned with your organizational goals.

It’s important that we aren’t just familiarizing your team with the CMS but also embedding best practices for content creation, site management, and user engagement. Our training programs are designed to meet your team at their current level of expertise. We’ll often do Zoom trainings before launch and provide recorded video screencasts for later reference.

Tools

You’re not always going to want to watch a video to get the answer to a question, so we provide other tools.

The first and most important tool is the CMS itself. Our implementations of any flavor of CMS — WordPress, Drupal, or others — have tons of inline and contextual help. If you’re using a video block, for example, to embed a YouTube video, you’ll see a tag that shows you how to grab the correct video ID. The experience we want you to have is to start doing something, ask yourself, “How in the world do I do this again?” and then immediately go, “Oh, yeah, that’s how. Thanks, Smith & Connors friends!” And we’ll hear you, wherever we are, and whisper, “You’re welcome.”

The other important thing is consistency in labeling across the entire CMS. Headlines should be called headlines all of the time, not “titles” sometimes. On a website, hierarchies are crucial. You shouldn’t have to wonder what’s going to happen when you do something.

We also create written guidance, including style guides for how to apply language, imagery, and components so you can stay on brand, and technical documentation so you have a clear reference.

And, being developers, we think of developers. We know we’re not the only people who are going to have access to the code. We comment throughout our code pretty extensively so that everyone knows the intent. Too many times we’ve tried to look into the code of websites and been completely flummoxed. We don’t want anyone else to have that experience with our code. We also use tools like Storybook, which includes designs and code of site components so that our clients can test and visualize components in isolation, ensuring consistency and coherence across the digital experience.

Tracking

Viewing your website as a dynamic entity is essential for its long-term success. We help clients implement tracking and analytics on all websites because making sure you know how things are going is vital to knowing how to respond to challenges.

Of course, we use Google Tag Manager and build dashboards in Looker Studio so you can see how visitors are engaging. This focus on data-driven insights allows you to make informed decisions that can significantly impact your digital strategy. We start early in the process talking about success metrics. And you spend a lot of time reviewing, providing feedback, and approving website strategy. After launch, you get to see if things are working the way you want them to. Websites are flexible, so tracking will let you see what content is working and why. You can track specific events and make future decisions based on real information.

We’re Here for You

We often set up service-level agreements with clients for a period of time after launch. There will be a need for updates to the system, to plug-ins, and to fix bugs that come up. We’ll do scheduled check-ins and support, not only to troubleshoot but to optimize and evolve your website to meet changing needs and opportunities.

The launch of your website marks the beginning of its lifecycle, and we are committed to ensuring its success through proactive partnership and support. Our goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible, empowering you to drive your digital strategy forward with confidence.