A couple of months ago I launched a massive portal site called HYIPJunction. It had been in development for over 18 months and as I had mentioned in my previous blog entry it was a complete project disaster. In the end it was decided to take it live and open it up to the public with all the bugs and see how it would get on.
Two months later and I want to come back and look at how the site has got on since we launched it. What has been good, what has been bad.
To start off with, I think the site has done better than expected. We managed to get several core features fixed quite early on after going live so the impact of the bugs has been minimal. There are still a host of bugs that need to be fixed and the programmers have been working on them a bit at a time. Mostly though the members have not been complaining or shown us too many ‘new’ bugs.
I’m not sure if we haven’t received many bug reports because the members are apathetic towards the site or if they simply haven’t noticed them. When you have been working on a site for so long the bugs, errors and little annoyances become glaringly obvious, maybe when you are just a user these things are taken to be part of the site. Who knows, maybe the developers of Google’s Gmail fret over a million bugs that they must get fixed, but I’ve never noticed anything wrong with Gmail.
I think it’s a lesson to be learned here, people are much more accomodating than you might think. Even when there is a glaringly obvious problem to you, the user may just accept it for what it is. There is a similar analogy in music. If a musician plays a slightly wrong note, the rest of the band may pick up on it and cringe, but the audience probably doesn’t know any better and thinks it’s part of the song.
There are still two sections that are in desperate need of fixing. The first is the share trading system which just doesn’t work full stop so has been effectively ‘switched off’ during the launch phase. This is not a terribly big problem as only a few people have shares in HYIPJunction and they are aware of the problems. The second section that we are aching to get fixed is the referral system. In the meantime we have come up with a new referral system based on what is currently working. We have made this in to a feature of the site and launch phase so members probably have no idea that the referral system doesn’t work as it should.
Finally, now that the site is live and being used every day by real people we are able to identify several areas that need to be redone to make it work better or more intuitively. This could never have been done by simply doing endless testing on the site.
On the promotional side of things, we have held back doing our joint ventures until a few more bugs have been taken care of. I think that some of these will get done within the next 7-10 days and if they have been fixed successfully we can begin the promotion of HYIPJunction in earnest.
We are getting a large amount of traffic from the search engines, in particular the site is doing extremely well for many keywords in Yahoo which is nice. The site is also slowly moving up in Google after it dipped a bit for a few months. The average amount of visitors have gone up too, from just over 100 visitors a day in June to 174 visitors a day in August. The traffic is coming from the search engines due to a large amount of SEO work that I have done on the site. My SEO expertise is discussed in other entries on this blog.
Related posts: