Saturday April 5 5:14 AM
The preferred method for preparing a web site is to soft-launch it a week or so before the hard-launch. Stir it up to make sure everything looks right, then introduce it to the general public in a fancy bowl with some bread sticks. That's the theory, anyway. The reality is that there is no such thing as a final website. They are never finished. It's not like print design, where once the piece is printed you can either re-run the entire thing at full cost or just live with the typos. Web pages, on the other hand, are very easy to update. So easy that it's hard to resist the temptation to skip steps, just make sure all the links work, and call it a day. After all, it's not going to cost $10,000 to fix those typos, right?

This is why the soft-launch was invented. It forces you to actually read the copy, because despite the 'soft' in the name that website is live on the internet and anyone stopping by will see it in all of its misspelled glory. For a brand-new website, only the few who know the URL will be looking at it, and for a redesign it's really just a hard-launch without a PR campaign. Keep that thought in mind as you read on.

Ignoring the advice of the little chef in my head (never launch a site on a Friday, which guarantees a working weekend for all parties), yesterday became the soft-launch date for the 3232design.com redesign, in anticipation of the hard-launch later this week. After a week or so on the development server it was finally ready for a hand-picked focus group to run through it on the production server. Well, them and anyone that Google sent over, but those people are the fire that heats the soft-launch stew to a rollicking boil. Besides, everything was mostly done, except for the main navigation and some minor bugs in the blog and contact form, but those would be fixed before the hard-launch anyway. Piece of cake. Er, stew.

This was not the hard-launch. Nobody was supposed to send the link to their friends, who would send it to their friends in some crazy Ponzi scheme gone wrong. Yet somehow the site ended up with about ten times its normal daily traffic, getting hits from all over the world. Without a fully-working main navigation. On a Saturday. The first really beautiful day of Spring in frigid Minneapolis.

The moral of the story is that even though changes are easy to make on a website, that doesn't mean you can go ahead and launch until you've made sure all the ingredients are actually in the stew. You never know who might show up for dinner.