With the Client’s nod of approval you deploy the product of many months of planning and development with the stroke of a key. You immediately open the nearest browser and tada, there’s the new site in all its glory. Beautiful, shiny, and downright stunning. The Client pulls up the site as well and with a sigh of relief shoots you an IM so full of praise and excitement it can barely squeeze through the intertubes.

That’s it, site done, case closed. Time to move on to the next shiny new site! This is a common scenario in many web development shops around the world. Ours is no exception.

Fast-forward a few months down the road and the inevitable is happening. Users are informing the Client that they don’t like a certain thing on the site. They can’t find something, they are offended by a certain photo, or they can’t stand hot pink. I mean really, how can you not like hot pink? Especially when paired with olive green, come on!

Anyway, this will happen, don’t you worry. Now the Client starts to feel a little downtrodden in regards to his site because goodness-forbid one person in the world doesn’t think it’s perfect. Well, what if that one person turns into a hundred? Can your site adapt or is it stuck in it’s current form until the next major overhaul?

Consider the iPhone for a moment. When it launched it was sans many of the features it has today. No iTunes store, no multi-person texting, no home screen customization, no form of GPS, no 3rd party app support, etc. Many of the features were later added because enough people though the phone needed them. Predicting to a “T” how millions of people were going to interact with the iPhone is somewhat unimaginable. You could guess on a few things and apply your experience to the others but hitting the nail on the head the first time is kinda like tuning a NASCAR for the Daytona 500 having never been to the track.

How many versions of iTunes has there been? Each release includes features you never though you could live without… but you did. Your site should be no different. Launch it with minimal features allowing for future improvement. There is the possibility that half of the pages on your site might as well not be there because no one is either finding or interested in them. Was it worth all the stress and headache two months ago just to learn real users don’t care anyway?

Creating a site from scratch and expecting to answer all of the questions up front correctly is a tough proposition. Not to say impossible, but unless you are Marty McFly and own a DeLoran you’re not going to know with 100% certainty.

The further you paint your site into a corner the harder it’s going to be to modify, remove, or add to it. Let’s say you find out the majority of your users want a big fat button in the main navigation for “Downloads” but because of what you thought they were going to want six months ago you created a navigation that wouldn’t accommodate a new item without reconsidering the entire navigation from the ground up.

My suggestion to Clients and Developers alike, account for post-launch modifications. At the bare minimum, use feedback from real users and analytics packages to refine your site for the better. Can the navigation be arranged better? Can we emphasize certain keywords? Can we prune any unused pages? Can we turn 3 pages of blah blah blah grey-text into one well targeted quick to read page? Every site has it’s own underlying unique solution.

After launch is where you get the most valuable information of all, real-world feedback. If you don’t allow for any changes to your never-to-be-touched-again-because-it’s-so-perfect site then that is your loss.

My advice, start simple and be ready to react to the organic nature of the real-world… errr, virtual world. Whatever, you get the point. The payoff may not come the day you launch, on the contrary, it may come months and revisions later when a random person who you’ll never meet has a amazingly wonderful experience on your site.