Letting the cat out of the bag
I’ve been thinking about how best to phase development. Often clients want a project kept tightly under wraps, so that they can do a big “Ta-Dah!” when they’re ready to go live. The Monty site instead went through a process of pre-solicitation before the site went live.
The motivation for secrecy is obvious: to launch with a bang and to minimise the possibility of being copied. Fact is though, if your idea is any good then someone else has probably already had a similar idea - even if they’ve never seen yours. Competition is inevitable and a product will succeed because it’s seen as superior to its rivals, not because it has none. In fact, if you’re operating in completely uncharted territory you’re likely to have a harder time of convincing people that they need your product at all.
The freelance projects for which I have access to web stats have one thing in common. Although they’re ticking over very well, it took about six months before the internet in general really noticed their existence.
The only thing you achieve by being coy about your product is that you set your SEO/SEM, promotional activities and general public awareness back by six months to a year.
Once the design for the site is nailed and I start development work in earnest, I’ll put up a teaser site. It will describe (in broad strokes) what the site is and who it’s for. I’ll also invite people to register their interest to take part in a short testing phase and to be notified when it launches.
After that, the hard work really starts 
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November 30th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
A very good post and a point that needs to be addressed with clients.
The big concern, for me, is DMOZ. A lot of the categories are virtually dead, with those responsible not seen or heard from in months. If that’s the case your SEO is going to take longer and you should plan accordingly.
Of course, another trick is to slap up a ‘Coming soon’ page. Yes, I know they’re horrific. However, it does mean you can start to get google’s bot on your single solitary page and more importantly that any partners you have can start linking to you using your keywords.
Google’s bot, once it is there, will hammer the sh*t out of your site, so going live should mean your content is searchable in around 24hrs.
You can also use Google’s sitemaps to direct the google bot to pages that aren’t linked, meaning your visitors won’t see them, but google can already be pulling in your pre-approved copy content and indexing it.
It does mean someone might search and end up on a basic non-styled page, but hey, small price to pay for instant high ranking on launch.
November 30th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
I think I’ll do it in four stages (targets in brackets):
(New year 2007) Logo holding page (for as brief a period as possible)
(Feb 2007) Teaser site, that will explain not only what the site is and who its for, but will say WHEN the site will launch. I’m not having the non-specific coming soon page of death.
(May 2007) Launched to a group of users selected from the mailing list (a hundred would be nice - fingers crossed!). Give those users some services for free in exchange for their participation. I’d aim to have this period last no longer than a month.
(June 2007) Site is open to all.
I think this timescale is generous. I should kick my own ass if I don’t deliver on it.