<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 22

(7) Launch

The launch can be the most exciting and often the most nerve-racking experience part of the job.

However, the truth is that you have spent so much time on the website, you know it pretty much from inside and out and you have to appreciate that users are looking at it for the first time.

Don’t assume that users will be going through a detailed laundry list of the things to do on the site, most users will glance at it come back and then come back again etc.

Some of the users that will be hitting your site will have no interest and will leave within a minute or so.

Do not let the initials users activity dishearten you, because as I mentioned earlier, you still have a long way to go before.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 24 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 17

(5) Testing stage

It is good practice to test all the features of your site as it is being built.

Normally, this can be done through a developers section of the website.

For example, in our example of the free dating site tigerdates.com, we can have a section that only the developer and yourself have access to ie. www.tigerdates.com/new-site/.

This page is unlikely to get indexed by Google since the actual link is not available through any other websites and also not indexed by any search engines.

Even though it is a private link, any user who can guess the link url can arrive at this page, so it’s a good idea to have login page for the developers section.

Although there have been questions about some browser such as Google chrome logging you’re your activity including the links you visit.

What Google does with this information is another entire story an have stirred up some controversial privacy debates.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 19 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 18

Make sure to thoroughly test your website, checking every link and especially the forms page where users need to enter data which gets submitted to the server.

Try to check every possible variations of data entry to find possible bugs and remember, you want to be able to break the system when it comes to testing.

For a highly interactive site such as a dating site, you will need to have customized code that talks to the database.

Basically the database will be the repository of all the information pertaining to the user and each time you access web pages with a members profile you are simply querying the database and retrieving the information that gets displayed on the web page.

Similarly when you submit information, it will be stored in the database.

Retrieval and access to the database needs to be reasonably fast and it involves writing optimized database queries.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 20 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 19

(6) Pre-launch stage

At the pre-launch stage, you will need to test the entire site for full operational capability including all the features, confirmation emails that are sent out and the important back-end administrative section for managing the entire site.

Since information is stored and retrieved from databases, the administrative section are essentially web pages that are designed to extract all the relevant information from the database in the same way that a user accesses their web pages.

The administrative section is like a super user with the privilege of accessing any data under their command.

This can include any data associated with user or users and can disable users from joining or sending messages.

These are necessary controls for the administrator of the site to manage users activity and make sure that the site is operating as it is intended.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 21 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 20

It is also the place where you will approve or disapprove photos submitted to your dating site, filter potentially fake profiles, provide support to users, check the stats of the users activity and many other features.

In addition to the administrative section of your website, you will also need to put additional code into your web pages to monitor the traffic and analyze the web page performance.

A good tool for this is Google’s own traffic monitoring tool called Analytics.

You apply the code provided to you once you have created an Analytics account and through there you will be able to see detailed traffic information, visitors activity, referring sites and many other information to track performance.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 22 >>>