The Launch of a Website

There are many things to think about when launching a website. There are also many levels of confidence in how buttoned up you think you are, vs how much you can add in after launch.

Just a quick background about me, I am a software engineer who builds websites in a variety of languages, many a time WordPress. I like to photograph, but I am in no way a professional. I love to cook but would not consider myself a chef. I just love to do all of those things and this will definitely give me some good practice. So this will be a great place to talk about what I have learned, my mistakes and how to be better at any of those topics. This post will discuss some of my thoughts throughout the launch of ArepasDelGringo.com.

Let’s start from the beginning. January 1st 2015. My birthday. For some time I have been wanting to put together a website and highlight something I love making, the Arepa. Now this isn’t just a 10 minute project. This is something that would need hard work, dedication and some sleepless nights.

I was ready for that. So in the car driving as a passenger with my wife going to do an errand. I told her. “I am ready, I want to do it. I want to create ArepasDelGringo”. So right then and there I pulled up my mobile phone, created an account with BlueHost, purchased the domain and crossed the first thing on my list right off. Registering a domain name.

We were just starting errands that day so I honestly couldn’t wait to get home and begin the rest. I immediately created a Google Document, outlined roughly my content plan. Added in my new BlueHost credentials and penciled in some other notes.

The next thing was I needed to purchase some hosting space. I jumped back into BlueHost and got a super sweet deal and started to immediately configure my hosting plan. Next I wanted to register every social platform I could think of at the time. I created a basic Facebook page, Twitter Handle, Youtube Channel, Google+ and Pinterest Account. So much to do and so much to do quickly!

The next few days, I spent going into each new account and filled out all the details, published photos, came up with branding, made things you know, look official.

I knew that the sooner I could get these created and build a brand the sooner I could begin to build an audience. Once I had that audience I could monetize it and regain my expenses thus far.

After the scramble of getting things registered and a home to point my blog to, I decided to start building the look and feel of ArepasDelGringo.com. I knew I wanted to focus on recipes, but also rich, professional looking photography. I also wanted the back end of WordPress (the platform of my choice for ADG) to be very flexible. And I made it that way.

I spent a few days installing WordPress, configuring it, building out the theme and backend –  the layouts and pages, menus and taxonomies. Still tweaking things as I go. This will be an evolving process, it honestly will never stop. Most importantly because once I build my audience I can start to understand them, and get a sense of their habits. Knowing their habits, I can tweak my website or layout to make them stay longer, or be more engaged.

OK – So now we have a domain name, a hosting account, a WordPress installation a theme and some sort of content structure. The next thing I needed to focus on was original quality content. Content is king. So now we get to focus on what this site is all about. the food.

I planned out my first few posts, set a food budget of $50.00, went to the grocery store and bought some supplies, food and a couple nice white dishes.

Immediately got home and started cooking, while at the same time photographing as I go. I was under a bit of pressure because I needed natural light and lot’s of it for my photography. So I was cooking away, and snapped some good pictures with my Nikon camera and tripod. Arranged the food so it looked nice, changed the angle – snap snap and done.

Once I got the photos, I ran on over to my office computer, uploaded the photos to iPhoto and started to decide what would make the cut for my first post. I was thinking about the format of posts I would be doing so I knew exactly what I would be needing for each one.

I edited the photos slightly, mostly making the exposure just a little bit brighter. Uploaded to my WordPress back end and created my first post.

AWESOME. ArepasDelGringo officially has one post now. Cool. Now I just need to do that times a lot of posts.

Before I publicly went “live” I made sure I had at least a few recipes in there and some content for users not to be unimpressed and went to Facebook. On Facebook I made sure my page was ready to go, shared a post to my page and created my first Facebook ad for $10.00.

Thats it, theres no going back now. We. Are. Live. Woohoo. I got excited. I was constantly refreshing the page to see those likes increase. It was slow at first but when January ended I officially had 10,000 Facebook likes to ArepasDelGringo!

Each shared post that I posted to Facebook, was a page on my WordPress site. So when a user sees that on Facebook and it gets clicked on, the user goes to ArepasDelGringo.com.

We are now in the 2nd week of February and things are still going strong. Before I think about monetization to much at this point I am continuing to focus on rich content to build my audience first. Without that audience, I have nothing. Just me taking time out of my day to write to an audience that doesn’t exist – and that is no fun.

So here we have it. The launch of a website from start to finish in about 4 days time. Of course there is no end date in when this website is finished. It will be an evolution of change ad I get to understand my audience and build around it. Keep in mid I skimmed a lot of the theme development process. I will discuss that in a later post.

This will be a post of many pertaining to the “behind the scenes look” at building a website. Hope you enjoy! Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.