Live from day one
When developing a new site from scratch, I like to make critical use of the time that the web site is not known by anyone. You’ve registered the domain and nobody knows about it. Its just a brilliant idea in your own head, yet to be executed.
How quickly can you code up a reliable ALPHA version before Google indexes it? This is the challenge!
In production, with no users yet, you have nothing to lose. So you go berzerk - half the time the site works and half the time its broken. If anyone found it yet, you would be upset. But they haven’t and you still have more time to keep coding..
I am doing this right now to a brand new site, which I am very excited about. But I was very surprised to find out that its already been indexed by Google after approximately only 1 week. Nothing links to it yet, but if you typed in its exact name, you would find it at the top of results. I’m pretty sure its because I placed an Adsense strip down the side of the home page, so Adsense immediately knows which site the ads were being rendered on and then goes off and tells the Googlebot to come check it out. This pressure has made it more important for me to really hurry up and launch the BETA version.
Now already, the site is working pretty well, does not crash and already provides the main service that it was intended to do. I’m really just deepening the feature set and usability at this point, but the raw core service is there.
So what do you think has happened? Its gone into BETA mode already without me even launching it. That’s right, some users have found the site via Google as well as small leaks from the site founders to family and colleagues. Now I find myself ultra excited each day when I get home from my consulting contract only to find fresh user-submitted information on this web site which isn’t even launched yet. And this is not fake testing information designed to pump the site up so that it looks busy from launch day one (which I normally recommend to do!). This is real, production quality information that is gold and will now stay there and be part of the finished site.
How exciting, automatic BETA launching, live from day one! You can’t beat that - users wanting to use your site before its even finished.
I am finding this ultra helpful already. I have quickly fixed a few bugs thanks to things that the users did, plus the best thing is that it makes me more excited and passionate about pushing ahead full steam as quickly as possible because real users are getting a kick out of the site.
I have stressed this before, but definitely do not wait until your site is 110% polished before you launch it. Someone else may have launched their own version of your idea by that time. Put your stake in the ground and get the users trudging through your live sandpit. That feedback is gold and will build a better site.
My site right now is still totally vulnerable to XSS style attacks, because I haven’t put in the regex’s to block them yet. But I will, later. Because I know its far more important to have the site working and looking good for users. Noone will XSS attack me until the site is prominent, but I have to get there first. I’d rather gain ten times the number of users that I currently have in the meantime, then fix the XSS leaks in a few weeks time.
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