by Heather Champ
There are two rather distinct schools of thought regarding the launch of a
new site: (a) one should launch a site even with the
occasional "under construction" to establish its presence, or
(b) one should wait until a site is complete before the
unveiling. This seems to establish a rather black-or-white solution to a
situation that can have so many variables. Typically a solution will present
its given nature of the individual site.
Preliminary sites can run the gamut from a simple announcement of things to
come to a reduced content site. The announcement sometimes include an e-mail
form that can be filled in so that a user can be notified when the site
launches or of a launch date. If you decided to set a specific date then you
should be prepared to launch on that date. "Coming soon" is an alternative,
although I have to confess that I have one squirreled away on my own site
that has been "coming soon" since August. It may buy a little time if things
fail to come together, but in most cases a specific launch date will most
likely spur a project to stay on schedule.
If you do decide to launch with a preliminary site of the reduced content
kind, create a finished look. Cul-de-sac pages with no information other
than the obligatory "under construction" graphic or text can be frustrating
and not that all informative for users. If a site is designed with
modularity in mind, elements or subsections can be added in a manner that
does not suggest that what has come before was in any way incomplete.
Launching a preliminary, announce, or "lite" site can also establish a
presence. Including META tags will allow for the site to be indexed and
included within the growing army of search engines. As it can take a period
of time to be included within their databases, it will allow for a site to
be more "complete."
Meta Tags
There are a number of whispers of urban legends regarding abuse or overuse
of META tags by sites to increase traffic or to siphon off possible traffic
from a competitor. I've heard that if you use the keyword "Pepsi" the
Coca-Cola site will come up, and that another savvy Webmaster used multiple
instances of the keyword "sex" to increase traffic, although the site was
related to shoe sales or some such other non-sex-related event.
These shenanigans aside, it's well worth the effort to include concise and
relevant meta tags to better represent your site. AltaVista has a brief explanation with details regarding
the inclusion of a META tag. The META tag looks like this:
<META name="description" content="This is the text that will appear as a description for your site."><META name="keywords" content="word word word word etc.">
The META tag is included in the <HEAD>...</HEAD> section of your
HTML document. AltaVista will index the description and keywords up to a
limit of 1,024 characters.
Under Construction?
Isn't a site always under construction? It's rather unnecessary to state the
obvious as the very idea of the Web is to incorporate changes and growth. A
good designer will determine which solution is best for each project.
