When is a Membership Website Ready to Launch?

Posted on 19. May, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks

Membership Site

One of the biggest problems that most membership website owners have when creating a membership website is knowing what must be done before launching and what can wait until later. This often means that webmasters are spending too much time getting their site ready, when they could actually be profiting from it.

When it comes to launching your membership website, a surprisingly small amount of things need to be done. Aside from the basic website stuff, like securing a domain and hosting, here are some of things that you must do. The first is choose and integrate a payment processor. Without this, there is no way for your members to make a payment.

You also need to have a majority of your website design completed. This includes creating and formating all of your graphics and making sure that you have created all of the necessary miscellaneous pages such as Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy. With all of this, you should already have a skeleton membership website ready for launch. In many cases, this all you need. The exception to this is when you are doing a large per-launch prior to the start-up date. If this is the case, then you need have everything polished and ready to go.

One of the most important things that must be done prior to launch is to make sure that the overall look and feel is what you want it to be. You also need to make sure that every single link is in working order. There is nothing worse than launching your membership website before it is has been double-checked and tested, only to find out there is a major problem that should have been taken care of.

One of the biggest hangups of launching a membership website is how much content needs to be prepared. In most cases, only a week or two of content is all that you need (assuming you will be updating your content weekly). If you are updating your content on a monthly basis, then only the first months content needs to be ready. Once you launch, you will then have 30 days to create the content for month number two. While it is great to be prepared, there is no reason to not launch your membership site if there is enough content to satisfy members for at least a week or two.

While it is recommended that at least some affiliate tools are made available prior to launch, it isn’t essential. Having affiliate tools ready is a good idea, but if everything else is ready to go, it is no reason to delay the launch.

There are a lot of things that must be taken care of prior to launching your membership website, however it is important to not delay your launch for an unnecessary reason.