What’s Your Website Waiting For?

It would be nice if website builds always went smoothly. In real life, they sometimes get hung up while waiting for a picture, a bio, or some other piece of content.

What can you do when you’re stuck in this way?

• Launch anyway, and change it later. This is often the easiest and best option. You get your website out and you can collect data that will help you make decisions for the future. If you can hide an ecommerce tab or start with stock photos and replace them later with those professional shots you just haven’t organized yet, your website can go ahead and begin working for you. Changing later is not usually a problem if you plan it with your web team ahead of time. However, we have talked with clients who have had negative experience with this approach when a webmaster or designer became unresponsive after launch, so there has to be a good plan in place — and trust, too.
• Change the plan. If you decide to launch even though it means giving up the blog or ecommerce or some other fairly important element, you can just make sure that the web build leaves you the option of adding that element as a phase two at some point in the future. It’s good to add to and update your website, from the point of view of SEO, so adding other elements in the future can be a plus. Just make sure that the new vision of the website actually works. If your web visitor’s expected path to purchase included an element that you’re now leaving out, run through the path to purchase again and make sure that it’s still as frictionless as possible.
• Wait. You can wait until you have everything gathered together. The negatives for this plan include the opportunity cost of being without your excellent new website for longer, the fact that your web firm will surely move on to other websites while you’re collecting those staff bios or whatever is casing the delay, and the possibility that the project will stall and you will be left with an unfinished website. These dangers make this the least positive option, from our point of view, but sometimes circumstances make it necessary.

With forethought and planning, any of these options can end up with a successful website in the long run.