Once you know the reasons your audience will come to your site and processes your site will support, you need to consider what these processes look like before site launch and after site launch. There are many changes that can occur between production and operations including your relationship with your developer (if you have one). So plan now, what should you be able to do after launch and how should you be able to do it?

How is it different than production?

The life processes that bring your audience to your site and the business processes that ensure that your site has what your audience needs are accommodated differently during the site's production than they are after the site has launched.

During site production, your goal is to develop your site and launch it with the appropriate content. Once your site has launched, your goal is to ensure that your site is successful and continues to grow. You may find that many, if not all, of your resources available or in use during production are different than those that will be taking over after launch.

Part of your process analysis needs to look at how you will accommodate your processes before and after launch.

Pre-Launch

Before you launch, you are creating the content you want available on your site at launch. Whether it is you or members of your team, your content was probably loaded using accounts with many administrative privileges. You can load files to the server, you can embed links, you can change the page layouts, and so on. You can make the pages of your site what you want or need them to be.

In order to accomplish these processes and tasks, you might have received training or you paid a developer to create your pages after you provided the content and applicable files. Depending on the purpose of your site, maybe you paid someone to create the content that you gave to the developer to enter into your site.

As you can see, during site production, the focus is getting the site ready for launch. What will happen to your processes after you launch?

Post-Launch

Your site is launched, now what? Assuming you haven't launched a site whose content will remain relatively unchanged, you will need a way to add new content to your site. How will you do that?

• Will you use the same resources you used during site production?
• Will you be on your own to duplicate the efforts of the professionals you hired?
• Will you be adding new content developers who will be limited in the way they can add content to your site?

Let's consider each of these questions.

Same Resources as Before

If you answered yes to the first question, then you might not have an issue transitioning from pre- to post-launch. You can continue to produce content on the site just as you have done before. No real issues here.

You Are on Your Own

If you answered yes to the second question, you will need to have learned how to do what your hired help was doing. If you planned well, you devised a site that supports your skill level. For example, your production team might have input your raw content and manually applied basic HTML tags. If you are not an HTML person, maybe you will use a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor that applies basic tags for you.

New Content Contributors

What if you answered yes to the third question, "Will you be adding new content developers who will be limited in the way they can add content to your site?" Depending on how many new content developers you will have and what they will be contributing, you might not want them performing all the same content loading tasks that you can perform.

For example, do you want the members of your open community site to be able to upload files to your site? When you created the initial content, maybe you loaded images for the stories you wanted to tell. Now that you site is open to your community, should you allow your users to upload images for their stories?

Questions like "Will I have enough server space to accommodate the images they want to upload?" might come to mind. There are ways to restrict file uploads but you still need to determine how you want the images or attached files to be stored once they are uploaded. Adding images and files is just one example of what you can do on your site that you might not want your other content contributors to do.

Of course, you could be adding just a few content authors that you have a relationship with so maybe concerns about files being uploaded aren't a big deal. What ever the situation, you might want to think about how you will accommodate the different skill levels of your content contributors.

Why does this matter?

Maybe you have already gleaned the answer to this question but if not, here's my view. If you don't plan now for what you will need after launch, you might not have what you need after launch. The processes you use to add content to your site before launch are not necessarily the processes you will use post-launch. Therefore, what gets developed should be what your post-launch processes need.

Also, if your site launches with content that is meant to entice your audience to contribute their thoughts and ideas, the processes you used to entice your audience to your site will not necessarily be what keeps them coming back. You will need a strategy for reaching out to past site visitors who have already seen or heard your initial campaign. You will need to add new information, new incentives to your site. How will you do this? What features will you need in order to make this happen? These features need to be included in your requirements.

Conclusion

Below is a table that simplifies the pre- and post-launch processes. There are many possible scenarios that you might face while identifying your requirements. Hopefully this chart will give you some pointers on what to analyze as you go forward.