In my 14 years experience of website development, one of the killer vices I see from clients is overplanning. They get into meticulous detail about EVERYTHING in regards to their website that’s not yet live.
In my opinion, release early, then iterate – get the website out as early as you can and monitor the feedback from your visitors, and update your site according to this feedback.
Over-elaborating on your plans can end up being a collosal waste of time. You’re constantly second guessing how the market will react to your site. Don’t second guess. Collect data instead. And shape your website around it.
As many people ask how can I sell online? – we like to ask them : how soon can you launch your business? Tomorrow? Next week? Go for it – launch it as soon as you can. Don’t waste time pondering. Launch it and monitor it, and adapt it. Your website should evolve according to your market’s needs.
These days it’s easy to integrate sophisticated analytics to a website, therefore it’s quite easy to monitor visitor behaviour and react to it. Site bounce rate too high? Change the content on the home page. Not enough orders? Get rid of the need for shoppers to register.
As more and more people look for an alternative to eBay, there aren’t many niches left online that aren’t competitive. So let your competitors be unreactive to the markets and create sites for themselves. We advise you create a website for your customers.
