The New WBJournal.com: Lessons From The Launch
Normally, I write about the experiences of others in this column. But I’m going to change it up a bit and write about my own harrowing experience re-launching the Worcester Business Journal’s website in the hopes you can glean lessons from it.
In case you didn’t notice, we launched a new and improved WBJournal.com April 23. The site has an entirely new look as well as more bells and whistles. Some of the features include a page devoted to the print edition so you can easily browse the stories from the most recent issue, as well as a multimedia page where you can watch video clips.
I won’t bore you with a laundry list of the added features. Just go to WBJournal.com and check it out for yourself. What I do want to do in this space is review the speed bumps we hit so maybe you can avoid them when you re-launch your website.
First, a little background. I worked with Jan Holder of Mainebiz, our sister publication. Worcester’s re-launch followed that of Mainebiz in December. Jan was the project leader and I supported her throughout. On both sites, we used a content management system tailored for newspapers called Saxotech.
Our experience is probably not like that of the typical business. We have a rather robust site that we put a lot of demands on. We also decided to manage the project in house, rather than call on an outside IT firm because we wanted more control. Keeping those facts in mind, here are the lessons I learned over the last six months:
Launching a website is hard. This might seem counterintuitive. How hard can designing and building a website be? Websites seem so simple. You can set them up for free nowadays, right? Well, yes, if you have a very simple website. But if you have a complex site, like WBJournal.com, it’s just plain challenging.
What’s so hard? Well, in our case, the easy part was the design. We managed to get that sorted out fairly easily. But translating that design into a website that actually works took real effort.
The biggest challenge was getting the integrations with our third-party vendors right. This group includes services like Exact Target, which we use to send our email newsletters, as well as our credit card processor, Authorize.net. Once you try to tangle your website code with that of another vendor, things can get tricky. All the vendors have different specifications and even if your developer has integrated with that credit vendor before, there are always curve balls buried in your own site’s code that you have to handle.
Your deadline will be pushed, but you must still set one. I’m not even going to tell you when we were supposed to re-launch WBJournal.com. Suffice it to say that there were many revisions to the deadline. The reasons were often beyond our control. Mostly we struggled to get a reliable web developer to support our work. That hurt us to the point where we finally gave up and did most of the work ourselves.
Web developers need supervision. I love web developers. They can do amazing things with HTML. But they often juggle a lot of work and don’t necessarily have the greatest attention to detail. They also aren’t terribly great spellers. No matter how careful we were with the copy and instructions we gave to our developers, dumb mistakes always crept in. Now that I’m messing around with code (I’ve learned a thing or two over the last six months), I’m making those same dumb mistakes. There’s something about juggling thousands of files of code that makes you forget how to spell. So proofread, proofread, proofread.
Testing is a special skill. The most maddening part of building a website has to be that once something is working, you assume it will continue working. But that’s not true.
Often, various pieces of functionality are intertwined, so when one piece breaks it can have a domino effect. I would do my best to fully vet a piece of functionality on our site, like our multimedia page, and sign off that it was ready to go. Then, two days before launch, I would get an email saying the page is completely broken. It seems that it’s always two steps forward, one step backward with web development. Once you make peace with that, you’ll sleep better.
You never really know until it’s live. You can do all the testing you want during the development phase, but you don’t know how the site will truly function until it gets into the hands of those who use it each day. And in our case, the editorial department was using the site for a few weeks before the launch, but because it was still “practice,” certain bugs didn’t rear their ugly heads until we actually released the site unto the world.
I’m pretty sure our experience is normal. I’ve yet to meet someone who was re-launching a website who didn’t look like they wanted to curl up in a ball under their desk. It’s a harrowing process that takes real stamina. I got through it largely due to my colleague, Jan. And that perhaps is the most important lesson: If you’re going to tackle such a big project, make sure you have a compatriot who’s there with you asking questions, pointing out problems and challenging assumptions. n
Got news for the Digital Diva? Email Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
Read more
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments