Launching a website, whether brand new or a relaunch, can feel heavy — especially if it’s for a large organization like a hospital, health system, or university. My advice? Stop waxing the deck and just launch it.
Migration Pains
When relaunching a site, your team has worked hard to branch off the content, restructure it, edit it, and polish. Every day that passes until you relaunch is a day that you either have to: a) keep the old site content frozen (good luck!) or b) track and duplicate changes across the old and new sites. The best path to minimize this pain is to launch.
Ironing Out Wrinkles Quickly
Worried that you missed a key piece of content or that some of the internal links aren’t going to work, despite countless hours reviewing and double-checking? This is normal. But a sure-fire way to find out is to just launch. Be prepared with your team to jump in right at launch and start checking all corners of your site for problems. Run a link-checker, keep a report of 404 errors handy and ready to run, and prepare to field questions via email and phone.
Second-guessing Stakeholders
If I spent 6 months working on a new site and stakeholders had a change of heart and decided to scrap it all I would be demoralized. You will be, too, along with your whole team. Stakeholders and other leadership are unpredictable, and honestly you know they want the new site up right now, anyway. Do everyone a favor and just launch.
How?
Sure, there are critical aspects to building a successful site and there aren’t many shortcuts. But resist the urge to add in too many extra reviews and presentations hoping to CYA. Instead, trust your skills, your team, set an aggressive launch date and just do it. You got this.