[Case Study] How To Launch a New Website

Dive into this episode where we dissect the intricacies of launching and revamping websites to maximize performance and visibility. Whether you're mulling over a new website or contemplating revamping an existing one, this episode serves as a masterclass in understanding the critical steps from conception through to going live and beyond. Join us as we unravel two distinct case studies—Frizzo and Cricket Matters—and share expert insights to elevate your online presence!

Timeline Summary:

• [00:00:42] Frizzo Website Launch
• [00:01:21] Staging and Testing
• [00:04:28] SEO and Google Rankings 
• [00:06:34] Cricket Matters Revamp 
• [00:07:55] Website Health and Speed 

Key Takeaways:

1. Pre-Launch Testing: Before going live, it's crucial to conduct a thorough staging process, which includes testing links and functionality to ensure no errors that could impact user experience.
2. SEO Essentials: Integrating tools like Google Analytics and Search Console right from the start is vital for tracking and improving your website's search engine performance.
3. Optimization for Mobile and Desktop: Confirm that the site works flawlessly across all devices to cater to a broader audience.
4. Feedback Loop: Utilize initial user testing with a small group to gather valuable feedback and make necessary adjustments.
5. Content Must-Haves: Ensure your site includes essential pages like About Us, Contact Us, and Privacy Policies to meet user expectations and legal requirements.
6. Post-Launch Monitoring: After the site goes live, continuous monitoring and tweaking based on user interaction and site performance are necessary.
7. Platform Considerations: While platforms like Wix or Squarespace might be good starting points, WordPress is recommended for scaling, optimizing, and customizing your website extensively.

Websites and Links Mentioned:

• Strength Matters
• Website Audit
• Free Strategy Call

Quotes:

"Launching a new website involves more than just going live; it’s about creating a fully functional, error-free environment." — James Breese

"Ensure every aspect of your site works perfectly on both mobile and desktop to provide a seamless user experience." — James Breese

"SEO isn’t just an add-on; it’s a crucial foundation for your website’s visibility and success." — James Breese

"Feedback is invaluable—use it to refine and perfect your site post-launch." — Josh Kennedy

"First impressions online are crucial; optimize your site to make a powerful impact from the first click." — Andrew Wallis

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Chapters

• 0:42 Frizzo Website Launch
• 1:21 Staging and Testing
• 4:28 SEO and Google Rankings
• 6:34 Cricket Matters Revamp
• 7:55 Website Health and Speed

Transcript

[00:00:00] James Breese: Strength Matters Media. Video. Print. Podcasts. 

[00:00:05] Josh Kennedy: Today, we're talking about how to launch a new website, a case study and, uh, and back as well. Here we go. I'm sure you boys miss me. Um, let us crack straight on James. We've launched, in fact, we've launched two new websites. Have we not? Which, which one do you want to talk about first?

[00:00:21] Cricket matters. And you also did episode one, four, five, wasn't it? You talked about, uh, revamping cricket matters. So maybe go back and listen to that one as well. Cricket matters or Frizzo. You, you decide. 

[00:00:31] James Breese: Let's do Frizzo first because Frizzo makes more sense. In some, in some respects, then cooking matters can be a, an updated version.

[00:00:39] How does that sound? 

[00:00:40] Josh Kennedy: That sounds great. Let's go for it. 

[00:00:42] James Breese: Cool. So it tends to, we've got two websites here now where there are websites already existing and we've rebuilt them and redeveloped them and pushed them forward. So let's talk about Friso's first. So Friso had a website that was there. It was, it was just sitting in this, in the space, but we've then redesigned the whole thing and we've launched [00:01:00] it this week.

[00:01:00] So it comes to launching a new website. If you have an existing website or if it's a brand new website, it's what I call like the one week staging process of making it live, because inevitably there will be errors no matter what happens. Okay. You can do as much pre testing as you want to, but you've got to get it live to see what's happening and what's going.

[00:01:21] You know happening on in the sense of like the website are the links working get people testing it because no matter how much You see and look at a website You there'll always be things that you'll miss because you just keep staring at it for time and time when you're trying to rebuild it So whether you're building a website on your own or whether we're building a website or any other professionals building website You've got to go through this what we call the staging process to make it fully functional and fully live So a good example of this is We made for his website live, I think, on the weekend on Sunday this week, and then we asked for it to sit and wait for a couple of days to let it propagate into Google to make sure everything is connected here.

[00:01:56] We asked him not to share his website with the world. So have a [00:02:00] look at it and let it sit here. Let's connect. Everything up properly, and then we'll start getting user testing to get some traffic to it. Because when you launch a new website, you've got to make sure all the connections there, i. e. is it connected to Google Analytics?

[00:02:12] Is it connected to Google Search Console? If you don't know what either of those two things are, you need to find out ASAP and get them connected, because they're really important for your health and your business, and get found on Google. So make sure those are connected. Secondly is, is everything looking okay in the first terms as in on mobile and on desktop, is it all working that way?

[00:02:31] If so, great. You move on. Then you move to the next initial user's testing site where you get friends and family, just a few members, three to 10 members, maybe to have a look at the website and see if it's working to give user feedback. And that's what's happened with Prizzo as an example this week, because what we've done is we've launched the website.

[00:02:50] Everything's looked good between us. But then when we launched it, we found there was a broken link in the footer, which caused a bit of havoc across the rest of the site in terms of its site [00:03:00] health. So we had it only had a score health of 84 percent. So when we tested it, we fixed it. It then went back up to 100 percent straight away.

[00:03:07] But we only found out through other people testing it. You with me? So before we make it live and spread out to the world and make ads and send to your email list, we've got to get local people testing it. Secondly, there's a couple of links in the top header broken just because it was just like we were migrating things across as well.

[00:03:24] So that was an issue too. And secondly, there's a couple of spelling errors, which is hard when I'm having to translate from English to Dutch when I don't even speak Dutch. Okay, so these little minor things make a massive, massive difference. So when you're launching a new website, you make sure you have the basics in place.

[00:03:41] Do you have an About Us page? Do you have a Contact Us page? Do you have Terms and Conditions, Billing Policy and Cookie, and Privacy Policy pages? And then, is it all connected to Google in a sense? Google Search, Console, and Google Analytics. And then, and only then, do we start to, when we retest amongst the [00:04:00] friends and family, we know it's all working, we make those changes, then about a week later, do we push to the whole world to make it big and fancy and get as much traffic to it as you possibly can.

[00:04:12] How does that sound? 

[00:04:13] Josh Kennedy: That's, that's great. Before we move on to cricket matters, can you just explain a little bit about why you would want to launch a new website? Cause you've said Frizzo had a website. It was, it was sat there. And so people were thinking, well, if I've got a website, why do I need to launch a new one?

[00:04:28] Like, let's dive into some specifics. Like, I dunno, what, what was his page speed? Was he getting found? What's his page speed now, et cetera. You know, the, the important stuff. 

[00:04:37] James Breese: Yeah, good question. So the first thing was, was he number one in Google for personal training in Nijmegen? I think that's how you pronounce it.

[00:04:44] Okay, Nijmegen, Nijmegen. And the answer was no. Nijmegen, you got the G. Nijmegen. Oh God. Yeah, that's what I've realized now. Okay. He was on the phone the other day learning about this, but. The idea is, are you number one in Google? No. Well, therefore [00:05:00] you have a website problem. As simple as that. 

[00:05:02] Josh Kennedy: Why not just look at the website 

[00:05:03] James Breese: you've got?

[00:05:04] Because if you go up and look at the website you've got, you may not have the right messaging. It may not be this fast enough. That's the other thing. I don't know what his before speed was, but I now know his speed is now at 100 percent on desktop and over 90 percent on mobile. So, which is, uh, not many people can get, just saying, I'm just saying, I'm just like scratching my own back, giving myself a pat on the back for that.

[00:05:25] But the idea is we've got to make it fast, readable and presentable and have the dynamics of the website, the layout, the search, the optimization in place. Because if you haven't got those things in place, then you have potential issues. So that's the idea. So launching a website needs to relaunch your website if it's not working, essentially, if it's not number one on Google, and you know there's multiple issues in here, technical or otherwise, you've got to relaunch it.

[00:05:51] Now, if you want us to have a look at it for you, you go to strengthmanage. com forward slash audit, we'll do a free audit and tell you what needs to be fixed. Whether you do it on your own or want our help, it makes no difference to [00:06:00] us. But the idea is we will do a free audit and tell you if you are, uh, have any issues, uh, that need to be addressed and then it's down to you.

[00:06:08] Josh Kennedy: Cool. Excellent. Okay. Let's move on to Cricket Matters. So me and you launched Cricket Matters last January 23. Was it last year we launched the website, got a few clients in, uh, did a few podcasts and then did nothing else whatsoever. And the things have gone in slightly different directions with strength matters.

[00:06:27] Um, which is why we are come full circle. We're back to cricket matters. What is, um, what have we done with cricket matters? 

[00:06:34] James Breese: So cricket matters was, so again, this is a website that we built quickly, built very quickly. And we thought, right, let's just see what's happening here and how it goes and how it works.

[00:06:42] So I built it up, it was built on a, not WordPress. We use WordPress for all our custom builds. Cause that's the fastest, the best way we can get it into, into Google. But then we use a domain hosting type service to build it for us just as a quick test run. [00:07:00] Uh, and yeah, we wanted to see how it goes. Now the first six months, it didn't really do much.

[00:07:04] It was just sitting there. We drove a little bit of traffic to it. We built a small email list. But then after six months, Google started to propagate it and say, Hey, people need to see more traffic for this. And they started to drive more traffic, which then meant, well, actually, there's something in here.

[00:07:19] There's search terms here that Google like, we like. People are coming for it from local areas. It's driving traffic that's intense. Therefore, we need to go back and revamp the site and make it optimized. So our health score, right, for cricketmatters. com was 47 Okay, I just checked that before this morning.

[00:07:38] And that was it, because it wasn't, it wasn't as optimised as possible. So 47 at 100, but it's still getting traffic. Now, with the relaunch, it's back up to 100%. Speeds have gone from 45 50 percent up to 90 plus percent on both terms. In fact, it was a bit annoying this morning, the dust was only 94%, not 100%.

[00:07:55] So I need to rework that and figure out what's going on there today. But relaunching that [00:08:00] website was when we knew it's a different process. It was working. It was converting, but it wasn't optimized We're now optimizing it for scale and that's the difference, right? We've gone back and optimized it for scale for content and driving traffic and being found on google.

[00:08:16] That's why we've done it So a lesson you can learn from this is is if you want to you have an idea for website So a lot of people do this when they're first starting out They'll go and build their own website on Wix or Squarespace, and that's okay. That's absolutely okay. But if you want to scale it, that's when I recommend we go to WordPress and we start to scale it properly, because that's how you build a legitimate big business.

[00:08:36] So quick and easy, you can build on Squarespace or Wix. Cool. But it's never going to be fully optimized. If you want to get optimized for your blog content, your, all your work to be found, you've then got to migrate to WordPress. And that's what we're doing with us now. And I said, let's 

[00:08:50] Josh Kennedy: do blogs and stuff on Wix or Squarespace.

[00:08:54] James Breese: You can, but it's not going to be as quick and it's not going to be as optimized as what you can do on WordPress. [00:09:00] That's the, that's the big takeaway that you can do a lot more customization. And again, it's not just about having a website there that looks good. And the blog post looks good. It's one that converts.

[00:09:12] Remember our growth formula is traffic growth equals traffic times conversions times sales. We need to get traffic then in the first place. We then need to convert and optimize these websites. They convert into leads, which you can't easily do on those two sites. And then finally, we've got to optimize the sales process on the backend.

[00:09:30] So you've got to drive traffic and there's no better way on the planet right now. And I'm sure all the top developers tell you the same thing. WordPress is the best for customized traffic. WordPress design can get found in terms of search content and traffic. Fantastic. There 

[00:09:42] Josh Kennedy: we go. Andrew, I don't want to, uh, I feel sad that you sat there in the background and haven't said anything because obviously this isn't, this isn't your area of expertise, uh, but anything you want to add in terms of why it's important to have a, you know, a good quality website.

[00:09:56] Yeah, 

[00:09:59] Andrew Wallis: just as James [00:10:00] said, you know, we, we, it's the first impression, um, online that people get, uh, when they, when they visit your website and first impressions mean everything, don't they? And if it's fast loading, which being on WordPress and getting it optimized is, then, you know, you're, you're saying. Uh, a good first impression on that side, and I was thinking about what James was saying earlier, but in particularly in relation to Frizzo's, I was associating it to a fixer upper when you come to property development, you know, you don't know what's what what's going on underneath the surface with things.

[00:10:39] So at times it makes a lot more sense to demolish and rebuild and which is what we've done. Yeah, 

[00:10:45] Josh Kennedy: exactly. Well, there we go. That is a case study on how to launch a new website. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. Uh, and if you do want help with your website, as James said, you can go to strength dot com forward slash audit, or if you want help [00:11:00] getting more clients and patients, then you can book in for your free 15 minute strategy call with us by going to strength dot com forward slash strategy.