Hoopla!

I wrote out a lengthy essay before I realized this is a rather straightforward endeavor. The how to’s of launching a (successful) website are simple and few. I’ll make this short. In fact, I’ll make it a list.

How to Launch a Website:

• Make something that has value to a certain, specific group of people
• Release it as soon as you have the minimal amount of functionality required for it to work.
• provide your users with an easy way to contact you
• Listen very closely to what your users tell you (and respond!)
• Surprise your users with your candor
• Surprise your users with innovative new changes shortly after launch
• Never (NEVER) allow data that your user has added to the site to become lost or irrelevant.

That last one especially. You can have all the bugs in the world and the users will understand – unless you make them fill out the same form twice. That’s unforgivable.

I be crankin’ em out like pancakes. JC Football Prospects just launched this weekend for junior college football players trying to get recruited to 4-year school. Good luck boys.

I just got the splash screen up for MultiPartySystem.com so I can start collecting email addresses as I develop the rest of the site. I plan to launch just as soon as I have ANYTHING there of value but I wanted to have this email collector up pre-launch.

You should visit the page and enter your email so I don’t have to come over to your house, knock on your door, write your email address down on a piece of paper, go back to my place and add it myself. Isn’t digital better?

• early with almost no features
• launch just a splash page with an email-catcher for notifying people of when I do launch it
• developing something that’s actually useful before I put it out to the public.

I think I’m going to nix the third option (it’s not very agile) and I’m probably going to blend one and two. I’m working on putting up just a splash page and as soon as I can get ANYTHING that even looks like a real website I’m going to launch it.

So why am I posting this here? It sounds an awful lot like I’m just babbling huh? Well, this blog has NO DECENT CONTENT and I’m trying to fix that. So there. That’s my launch plan.