What is LaunchThing for?
When you relaunch a website, search engines such as Google can take some time to refresh what they know about your site. Also, earlier visitors may have bookmarked pages that no longer exist.
People using this stale information need to be effectively guided to appropriate new content. If they aren't, your site's effectiveness could dip significantly, turning an exciting time into a stressful scramble to sustain results.
Also, any SEO investment that may have been made in the earlier site could be lost, as inbound links point search engines to missing pages.
Often this task is omitted from project schedules, or falls down the list of priorities. Spreadsheets, custom scripts, awkward pattern matching rules in arcane web server configuration files... it's really no fun at all. And do all those redirection rules still work when you're about to go live?
LaunchThing is a web-based service that takes the pain out of this task, and turns a laborious, error-prone job requiring frequent manual checking, acts of faith or wilful optimism into a quick, simple task that can be collaborated on, monitored, adapted easily and tested at any time.
It will save money, time and anguish for you, your development team and your client.
How does it work?
The workflow goes like this:
- Tell us about your project: your domain, your servers and the tools you're using.
- We discover your old and new content, via analytics tools, log files or site spidering.
- We guide you through your legacy content, and help you build redirection rules to send people and bots to the right place.
- You export the redirect rules in the format you need for your web server, and install them.
- We test your site, and tell you when you're good to go!
Along the way, you can collaborate with clients and colleagues, and show them how things are going.
How much does it cost?
It's currently free for early adopters. There will always be a free plan which is not feature-limited.
What next?
We're launching within a month - sign up below to stay informed.