Going Live (Beta)

I recall that prior to the introduction of cell phone services (yes, I can even remember the days prior to answering machines...), one of the arguments put forward against cell phone uptake was that the sound quality would be substantially inferior to the clear, crisp, noise-free  land line audio that people were used to, and that the public would never use these new mobile devices. Wrong.

In fact, most people are very forgiving of glitches in technology, because most of us live with all kinds of things constantly breaking or intermittantly not working, which is just a reality when it comes to personal computers and the Internet (not to mention our physical being). When the likes of Google and Blackberry experience system failures, you know that 100% uptime is an impossible promise. As well, if it's mostly about the content anyway, let's just get the info up--if a Youtube video on slowcookers has poor production values, I don't care, I just want to know how much water to put in when I'm doing ribs! (answer: not a lot).

When it comes to launching a website, for some organizations I often recommend going live as a "BETA" site, with parts of the site incomplete, and even parts not working. The advantage of this process is that you can then get feedback and suggestions for improvement from a broader range of people than just your internal committee working on the site development. Many organizations still view a website build as similar to creating a print product, and wait until the site is absolutely perfect before going live. Even the brightest developers and staff will never be able to recreate all scenarios of usage, or volume of usage, and the simplest and cheapest way to do this testing is simply to let the world tell you what they think.