Please note this is Linked From our Main Article – 7 Things Clients Should Know When Building A Website
5 of 7 – For Account Managers, Owners, Marketing Managers and Clients – What to know before a Website Launch/Online Software Launch
Very similar to email, websites come with their own idiosyncrasies so here a few guidelines to help overcome the web-server, setup and launch pitfalls.
For simple hosting solutions, pay a little bit extra for hosting in your local country. We recommend Ilisys in Australia for basic websites, their support team is quick to respond and we run around 200 sites on their platform without major hiccups.
If your agency is recommending a service (as long as it is not their own) they will have tested many to thousands of sites and matched their deployments to suit. Find out who they use (it should be no secret), but also pay that little bit extra to have them install and maintain your webserver, all of the technicalities of how your website performs on the server is best left in their hands and their responsibility. They, like us probably have partner relationships with server providers and can push through priorities and workarounds when needed.
On the other side of setup is the website launch. Plan and revisit your plan with your agency as the development progresses. Make sure you are discussing requirements on both parties and you are clear about who is doing what. If you can’t see it on the plan, no matter how small it is, ask about that banner, or heading, email address, where the form or payment notifications go – there are thousand little things that can trip up a website launch at the 11th hour, so challenge the plan. For anything to do with user interactions, sign up forms, payments, competition entries, always, always have one or two redundancies in place (we use client email notifications and a free gmail account to monitor activities).
Finally, when setting up passwords for anything, make sure they follow an online guide for complexity; a mixture of letters, numbers and special characters. Too often business websites are hacked after a client changes the admin website password to something like their daughters first name!