Your website is done – time to start working

There is something strange about the way that customers and clients in the web business work together. It is almost common knowledge nowadays that you don’t just launch a website – you launch a web presence! Nevertheless it seems like most relationships between customers and clients are project based, meaning that they focus on launching a website and when the website is launched, the customer-client relationship is winded down to a minimum of support and bug fixing.
There are at least three reasons why this pattern is counterproductive:

1. Experience tells us that most successful websites like Facebook, Wikipedia and Craigslist all started out with one business plan and ended up being successful with a completely different business plan. If you simply launch a website and leave it there, you will never be able to tweak your website into the successful entity which actually serves a customer need.
2. Some of the most successful websites today are community driven, which means that the website constantly changes shape and content based on user input. For community websites the hard work does not end when you launch the website it actually only starts then. When dealing with communities you should be prepared to spend almost more hours and resources on maintaining you website as you did building it.
3. Tracking and KPI measurement is becoming increasingly important – especially in these times of financial tightening. But measuring you website traffic and your KPI’s avail to nothing if you are not also willing to spend resources on optimizing your website based on the statistics. The truly successful website manager in a time of financial crisis is the person who constantly measures and optimizes the website in order to always create optimal ROI for the website. So again, the hard work doesn’t stop when the website is launched. Launch day of the website is simply the beginning of a long and meticulous measure-optimize-measure process, which never ends because a website is a living creature which constantly needs to adopt to changing markets and user needs.

It is puzzling why these simple facts are so often ignored in the offline world – resulting in scores of half-baked monolithic websites which are kind-a-cool, but not really relevant for the target group or the original strategy – simply because the website hasn’t been allowed to develop in a fruitful and ongoing ping-pong relationship between clients and agencies.
I don’t say this often, but maybe we should take a look at how things are done in the offline world. When you launch a store in the real world, you are perfectly aware that you need to hire a bunch of people to maintain the store and sell the products within the store. It is basically not terribly difficult to build a physical store – the hard part is to maintain the store and persuade the customers to keep coming back.