How to launch your website
There are a number of considerations if you're thinking about launching or relaunching your website. What will your domain name be? What technologies will run your site? How much server space will you need? Bandwidth? How will you market your site?
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Planning
Choose a domain name
One of the first steps in launching a new site is choosing a domain name if you don't already have one. Domain names, in general, are cheap - they can run as little as $2 and can be bought for 1-5 years at a time.
Part of the process of choosing a domain name is visiting a domain name registrar to see if that name is available. If your first choice is not, many registrars will show you options for what similar names might be purchased.
If you haven't already purchased a domain, you might want to check out The Effective Strategy For Choosing Right Domain Names.
Pick the CMS that best fits your needs and abilities
For those who are going independent with their website for the first time, WordPress is probably the recommended software. If you've been running WordPress for a while, then you might want to consider a CMS built off the Django framework.
Web Design
Always design your site before committing anything to code. Start at the beggining and you'll have far fewer last minute changes.
Finding the right host
Once you have a domain name, you have to buy space on a web server to host your web site. There are a lot of hosting companies, and the services and support they offer are extremely varied, so you will want to do some research before making a decision.
It's like buying a house - make sure the roof isn't leaking and the electricity works before you buy.
We've put together a list of our favorite hosting providers to help you make your decision.
Putting together the Ideal web team
To pull off the feat of creating a website successfully, you'll have to have the manpower to do it. When choosing a web team here are a few pointers:
- Look outside the journalism department for programmers and developers in other majors (computer science, software engineering)
- Give online editorial duties to the regular editors; hire developers for technical projects
- Try hiring people on a by-project basis and filter through the developers you want to keep as permanent contributors
Creating a sandbox
It's common to establish a sandbox for developing your website before it launches publicly. A sandbox is space on your server where you have access to the full functionality of your content management system and ability to modify the content management system if it's open source. It's generally completely isolated from your main website, so you have the freedom to break things left and right.
Pre-launch
Confirm that your email settings have been duplicated
If you're pointing your domain name to a new website by changing the DNS nameserver, then you'll need to duplicate your MX records (the settings that control the destination of your email) on the control panel of your new website.
On a related note, if you're moving from College Publisher then the it is most likely that the email addresses associated with your domain are just forwarding to Gmail addresses. When you make the switch to a new host, you'll want to make sure you duplicate those settings or set up Google Apps for Your Domain. The standard version is free and CoPress highly recommends it as a team collaboration suite with many tools.
Post launch
Make sure WordPress knows you have a new domain
If you're using WordPress, make sure you've changed the base URL from whatever it was for your sandbox to your primary domain. Otherwise, your new domain might map to the home page fine, but all of your articles will have the sandbox URL.
Check to make sure all of your needed plugins are active
For WordPress, you'll want to make sure these plugins are active and working well as soon as you launch your site:
- Akismet - A service provided by Automattic that filters out spam comments. You'll have to sign up for an account on WordPress.com to get an API key, but that will save you from having to go through large amounts of spam comments.
- All In One SEO Pack - Optimizes your headlines and metadata for Google.
- Google Analyticator - Needs to be activated so that Google Analytics starts tracking page loads on your website. If you're signed in to your Google Account, activation should be one-click authorization.
- Google XML Sitemaps - Automatically generates the sitemaps needed for Google (and other search engines) to properly index your website.
Test your email
If you've changed any of domain settings, test to make sure that you can still send and receive email from the addresses associated with your domain.
Ensure that search engines can find you
Make sure that your robots.txt is allowing search engines to index your website.
When developing in a sandbox, it's common to include <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> in the <head> of an HTML page to make sure that your new web site in progress doesn't show up in a search engine. You should also make sure that this is no longer there. In WordPress, this is an option under the "Privacy" tab.
