cultureblog

Post 5 of our ongoing case study – Project Tee Compressed

It’s been just about 3 months, almost to the day, since our last post on Project Tee Compressed. We haven’t blogged about our progress but development has been moving full speed ahead. It’s hard to squeeze in the time to write about our progress and milestones, while at the same time actually doing the work.

We are, however, excited about the progress we’ve made with our new site at TeeCompressed.com. One of the decision points every project has is deciding when to launch. The critical question of when the design and programming is good enough to go-live. We eventually reach this point with all of our clients and many of them develop a strange hesitation, almost a “stage fright”… a failure to launch. They want to continually refine the site and tweak the design, constantly polishing the look and wordsmithing the content.

Launching a new website requires a leap of faith. At some point you have to weigh the cost of not launching the site and whether the last 5% of development and adjustments are worth the lost exposure and potentially lost sales of a delay. I’ve always been a fan of rapid prototyping (or rapid application development). Rapid development allows us to build the framework of a website quickly, paying as much attention to detail as possible, but not allowing it to slow down the process. Building a website (or any application) quickly, gives us a chance to get more done sooner and learn from any mistakes earlier in the process so that we can incorporate those lessons into the final design. Rather then waiting to make major changes after extensive development, we build quickly and make minor adjustments along the way, saving money and building a more useful and more testing final product.

The reason I bring up rapid development is because this was our process with building TeeCompressed.com. Our goal was to get the site up and running, make the search engines aware of our existence and get the clock ticking on organic rankings and exposure.

By having a under-construction page already live, we were seeing some search engine activity. We went through several more design revisions before going live but we always kept our number one goal to launch the site as soon as possible. We launched the site in first week in June. We registered a new toll free 877 phone number to route all customer service and order inquiries to a single point. In the past, we’ve written about using a service such as Ring Central (see our post on Expanding your Digital Office) and how important (and inexpensive) it is to represent your company correctly and invest in doing things right from the start. A simple toll free line can be as little as $4.99 per month.

After launching, our site had been live about 3 days and our toll free number had been live about 48 hours when we received our first phone call and request for a quote. The quote for almost $3000 in compressed t-shirts. This situation is a great example that we share with our clients, about the importance of launching the site as soon as possible and as soon as it is ready. Had we delayed our launch, we would have missed a great opportunity for getting a new customer and potential sale.

In the interest of keeping this post short, I’ll run the numbers to-date. As a prospective website entrepreneur,  you should expect to invest (over time) an appropriate amount to see things through to success.

• Total time elapsed: 25 weeks.
• Total time site has been live: 11 weeks.
• Purchased 5 domain names at about $9 each for a total of $45.
• Hosting fees at $39.95 per month x approx. 6 months.
• Toll free # at $4.99 per month.
• Total graphic design time to date: approx. 45 hours
• Total website development, search engine optimization & programming time: 75 hours.

Total cost to date:
120 hrs x standard $65 per hour rate = $7800 + $45 domains + $239 total hosting + $15 phone #

Approximate cost: $8099.00

Keep in mind that we were only working on this site part-time and very often had to stop work completely while we switched over to other client work. We’re excited about the Compressed T-shirt product and our site traffic is slowly growing but search engine optimization takes time. As the graph below shows, we are trending up. But as we say to all clients, even with a personal trainer, it takes months to get in shape. You don’t fire your trainer after 3 weeks because you don’t yet have that perfect body.

See all posts on Project Tee Compressed.