- You have preserved valuable resources and good characteristics of your previous site (example: search engine rankings, urls, page titles, descriptions, content, workflows, etc). Considering that your site development is likely to take weeks, if not months, on a test installation, then make sure to synchronize last minute changes on the old site (example: customers, orders, comments, articles, etc)
- You have available support staff to deal with urgent issues and post release testing. If you completed solid beta testing of critical website workflows and custom work during the project development, your issues should be minimized. The best Joomla site release is seamless. Visitors should not notice that the site is down or unavailable. In the worst case, allow for an option to switch back to the old site.
- You have prepared a minimum 6 month Internet marketing plan in advance. Ability to measure and compare project success before and after the site release is critical. If you use Google Analytics, create an annotation of the site release date. Finally, the proper timing of the release is critical for the best Internet marketing and sales impact especially if you run a seasonal business.
- You have signed up for a Joomla maintenance plan. You won’t always have access to development staff who created your website. Therefore having access to ongoing site maintenance and quick support is critical for you to be able to meet your business objectives.
Related to examples of specific issues, I have seen during some of our own site releases, here are a few to watch out for:
- Friendly URLs not configured or working correctly
- Google Analytics tracking not installed or working correctly
- Joomla favicon not replaced or removed
- Some features not implemented correctly (example: blog comments)
- Product sorting not working correctly
- Content not finalized or prepared for the site release (hiding certain sections, categories and articles).
In your opinion, what are signs of a successful Joomla site launch? Please post your questions or site release issues in the comments below.
Ogy NikolicJoomla Consultant
