#devdigital

Congratulations on launching that new website! Once your site is online, you can focus more resources on other activities, but don’t move too quickly. After a site goes live, you need to make time for several technical and nontechnical tasks designed to make sure the site is performing as expected and is easy to use. Testing and marketing should be an ongoing effort.

Testing Your Site

Once the site goes live, you must schedule various tasks related to maintenance. Take care of backups for all data and site content. Be sure someone is applying security patches and updates, especially security patches.

The first and most important thing to consider once your site is live is to confirm that it delivers a great user experience. Here are some of the things you need to do:

·        Check that internal and external links work

·        Make sure external links open in a new tab, not the current one

·        Confirm your website’s appearance is correct across browsers and devices

·        Verify that social media sharing icons work as expected

·        Ensure the contact forms, and other forms, submit data correctly

If you have third-party plugins like e-commerce or email, make sure they work as expected. If they are buggy or unreliable, this will make visitors unhappy.

Purchase an SSL certificate if you don’t already have one. This will put visitors at ease and help with your ranking on Google. How much? Well, no one knows that, but SSL certificates do help.

Accessibility is huge, so check that your web accessibility features, like alt image tags, are working. Experts will say that accessibility alone does not affect your search engine ranking but things that make a site more accessible do. Seek certification that your website complies with Section 508 or WCAG 2.0 standards, too. Furthermore, you’ll please visitors who need that kind of support to interact with your site.

Schedule a site audit. You want to make sure your site’s tags, images, links, descriptions, and keywords still work to promote the site. Sometimes the keywords you’ve focused on become less important and others become more important, so you need to adjust your content periodically.

Promoting Your Site

Launching your new website is the beginning of a journey toward marketing success. Maximize your odds by taking regular steps to promote your site online, not just through search engines.

·        Submit your XML sitemap. This sitemap is a directory for the site, designed for a search engine to read, not a human. If you have pages that aren’t internally linked to other pages, this sitemap helps those pages be found. If you update your pages frequently, Google will crawl the updated pages, too. This matters to your future visitors, who want up-to-date content, and to Google which wants to present the newest versions of your pages to searchers.

·        Content is king. Add new page content or new blog posts regularly. If you have old blog posts that need updating, do that instead of deleting them. Use good search engine optimization practices on your blogs and pages, too.

·        Use Google My Business. This is a great, free tool for promoting products and services and making announcements. You can post over 130 words, an image, and a link to the relevant page on your site.

·        Do Off-Site SEO. Launch a sustained campaign of promoting your site by getting links from blog sites and review sites.

·        Leverage Your Social Media Accounts. Advertise that new site on Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on. Create a plan for promoting company news and information on your social media accounts.

A Great Post-Launch Period is Critical

Once you’ve launched an app, you have to change your focus from development to marketing. Monitoring that app requires attention to both marketing metrics and performance. An app that looks great on launch will probably end up abandoned by many users. How can you minimize this drop off in use? By knowing what to monitor and how. Pay attention to application performance, user engagement, and various analytics.  

Monitor Application Performance

Any issues with downloading or using the software will drive users away. You need to monitor its stability and speed to ensure the user experience remains as good as it was when the app was new. You can monitor your app’s performance in several ways. A variety of performance measures can be useful for tracking application performance:

·        Percentage of crash-free users

·        Average session time

·        Frequency of crashes

Crashing is probably the single biggest reason that users uninstall an app and use something else. Applications can stop responding, so Application Not Responding (ANR) reports are helpful. Those numbers tell you how well the software works, but what users think of the app is probably even more important.

Track User Engagement

Most people who download an app never use it or abandon it soon after they try it out. The uninstall rate is valuable, if you can get that from the app store. Pay attention to the number of users who download an app and never use it. Some people will download an app, log in and then do nothing else for days or weeks. You want to track both groups of users and try to find out why they abandoned the app. Average session length is also a good variable to monitor.

·        Return rate (average number of sessions per user over a given time period

·        Total users and new users

·        Number of users who downloaded the app and never used

·        Number of users who uninstalled the app

User reviews are a goldmine, so check them regularly to see what people love and what bugs them. Normal performance metrics won’t tell you if users are unsatisfied with a certain feature’s speed or user-friendliness.

You may learn how to update features that aren’t as useful as they could be. You may also get ideas for version 2.0 of the app.

Review Analytics

Go beyond performance measures to look at Study the different features of your app. Here are some good questions to ask:

·        What’s popular?

·        What’s not so popular?

·        What’s not being used at all?

·        If you’ve launched a new version of the app, what percentage of users are downloading it?

The answers will help you decide how best to improve the app before launching a new version.

Update the App’s Code

Your code will probably need to be updated eventually if you keep offering the app. If early users find a bug that slipped past testing, you need to know so you can revise your code accordingly. Here are things consider over the product’s lifecycle:

·        If your software draws on third-party tools for some of its functionality, you need to make sure those integrations continue to work seamlessly.

·        Review user data to see what features need to be changed.

·        Make sure you have a system for implementing version control on code so future development work can be more organized.

·        Keep the software up-to-date with security patches.

Get Expert Help to Build and Support Your Mobile App

Hiring outside help for your software development work makes sense for many businesses, though having internal development talent can also makes sense in some situations. Cost and time are the key factors in deciding to hire an ancillary firm or hiring a developer. However, you should still consider all of the advantages and disadvantages of each software development strategy.

The Advantages of Outsourcing

Outsourcing is popular because it offers many benefits:

·        You can easily engage developers with different skills as needed.

·        If a project grows in scope, a software development company could easily assign more people to the project.

·        You only pay for development work, not hardware, software, or office space.

·        You save money on salaries by only bringing in development help when you need it.

The time and money you save can be invested in other business goals while the software development work proceeds. For a relatively small project, outsourcing is usually the better strategy. However, outsourcing also has some disadvantages.

The Disadvantages of Outsourcing

Hiring a third party introduces a few business risks. You could hire a firm that lacks the technical expertise you need, because they were very good at overselling their capabilities. This might not become clear until months into the project.

You may lose access to your development team after the software launches because the development firm will move the team members to new projects as soon as possible. Assembling a new team and kicking off a new project takes extra time.

Outsourcing costs vary depending on the skillset required, sometimes dramatically. Your project cost could go way up just because the new skills it required to have a higher market value. An extra $15 per hour adds up fast on a large custom software project. On a positive note, some software development firms charge a fixed hourly rate.

You can’t know if the development firm is going to be easy to work with until after the project starts. This is a bad time to find out their people don’t understand your business or your business’s need and are hard to communicate with.

The Upside of Hiring an Internal Developer

The biggest advantage of having an in-house development team is that the programmers have a keen interest in making the project a success. After the software goes live, your employees will be around to support the product and work on the next project. Executing a small project is much easier when you have people with the necessary skills on the job already.

Communication with team members will almost always be easier and faster. With an outsourced project, the developers could be several time zones away from your company, while the project manager is in yet another time zone.

If the project is big, and mission-critical having developers on the payroll may be worth the investment. There are, however, a few disadvantages to in-house development.

The Disadvantages of Having an Internal Development Team

Building an in-house development team is expensive, too expensive for many businesses. Keeping developers around between projects can be expensive as well. Cost is perhaps the best argument against having an in-house development team.

If you need to change course, such as shifting from one type of code to another or expanding from Apple to Android with your app, you have the same issue of bringing on experienced developers. You face the risk of a key member of the team just leaving, especially a star performer who is always subject to being poached by another tech company.

Working with skilled technical people introduces a couple of business risks. You could hire underqualified people and only later find out they oversold their knowledge or expertise. As Chief Business Officer Stephen Davis said, “There is no such thing as a full-stack unicorn.”

While using your employees to develop new software can save money, you also run the risk of creating a solution that’s sub-optimal because you are building what your teams’ skills will allow. Instead of creating the best site or app from a marketing perspective, you build what your team can build. This can harm you in the future as web-related technologies change or the software needs to be enhanced.