7 Challenges in Launching a New Website Every Startup Must Overcome
Launching a website is one of the biggest indicators of entrepreneurial validity; these days, your business isn’t considered truly established until it has a website. Accordingly, it’s one of the biggest milestones entrepreneurs identify when charting out their startup plans, and one of the most rewarding achievements in the startup process.
It’s a fun process, but it’s also a challenging one. Even though website development technology has advanced to the point that almost anyone can create one (especially through a template solution like Wordpress), there are still some major hurdles you’re going to face when launching a new website for a startup.
1. Finding the Minimum Viable Product
Naturally, when you design and develop a website for your brand, you’ll want everything to be perfect. You have a bold vision for the future of your brand that you’re passionate and excited about, and you want your website to reflect that vision. As you develop, you’ll be tempted to add in new features, new sections, and go over old sections with new content, new material, and additional functionality. However, it’s in your best interest to opt for a minimum viable product: the least amount of features necessary to make your site suitably operational. You can always expand later.
2. Design and Layout Choices
Your design and layout choices will be important factors for your website’s success; they’ll be responsible for forming your visitors’ first impressions, motivating them to take action, and possibly determine whether or not they’ll ever come back for more. Accordingly, there’s a lot of pressure here. If you’re working with a template site and trying to build cheaply, your options are going to be limited. However, I recommend seeking professional design talent to assist you here, as finding a design that stands out and suits your brand is essential if you want people to eventually convert.
3. On-site Copy
Your on-site copy presents a handful of different hurdles. You’ll have to choose the right titles for your pages, whether you follow basic conventions like “Contact” and “About” pages or opt for something more creative. You’ll also be writing all the material on your website, from the taglines on your home page to the paragraphs on your other internal pages. You’ll want to write copy that’s firmly within your brand voice, unique to you and representative of your identity, but you’ll also want to write copy that’s informative and compelling enough to drive action.
4. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important online marketing strategies of the modern era. It’s relatively inexpensive, and results in permanent increases in online brand equity; your website’s visibility and ability to be found online. SEO requires ongoing on-site content marketing and off-site content and link building, but before you launch, you’ll need to ensure your website is sound from a technical SEO perspective.
5. Calls-to-Action
The calls-to-action throughout your site will be responsible for converting your incoming traffic into full-fledged customers. These can take the form of short, word-based callouts at the end of your blog posts, buttons driving people to purchase individual items, or a form field on a contact page that your users need to fill out. There are many different types of conversions, but no matter what types you choose, you’ll need to include them plentifully, visibly, and with a solid offer in tow. There are plenty of best practices for CTAs to follow, but it’s still hard to put all the pieces together. For help, see The Definitive Guide to Crafting Winning Calls to Action in Your Content.
6. Hosting
Though it may not seem like a major decision at the time, your choice in hosting providers can have a massive impact on the eventual functionality of your site. For starters, your choice can affect the cost and functional limitations of your site; beyond that, a good hosting provider can guarantee higher uptimes and better support if something goes wrong.
7. Attracting Initial Momentum
Finally, remember that launching is the end of one process, but the beginning of a new one. Once launched, you’ll need to build initial momentum in the form of traffic to your site. This, by necessity, likely includes content marketing, and other online marketing or advertising strategies.
If you’re able to proactively identify these potential hurdles when launching a website, you can psychologically prepare for them and establish an action plan. There’s no way to objectively make these steps easier, but you can improve your chances of success simply by preparing and doing more research. Launching is stressful, but remember — you’ll always have the ability to make adjustments after going live. Make the best product you can, but don’t compromise your launch by being overly perfectionistic.
For more content like this, be sure to check out my podcast, The Entrepreneur Cast!
