With the final version of the book at our publishers to have the t’s crossed and i’s dotted, we thought that it was time to put up our new website www.brightermarketing.com. We were going to wait until the book was launched in January 2009, but after our marketing brainstorming session,  we realised that it was important to build-up to the launch rather than just do it all in one hit. In this way we could develop some inertia for the actual launch and keep our book in people’s minds.

The website was finished from a design and content point of view late in the summer, and we worked with a freelance web designer to develop the site using Joomla - an open source, web content management system. Essentially using Joomla means that you can update all of your content by logging into an administration console. It is OK to use, but if you aren’t technical it can be tricky especially if you don’t have any knowledge of using CSS (Custom Style Sheets). Which is why we used a designer with knowledge of Joomla to set everything up for us, and just use the administration dashboard to add new content etc. Which we learnt to do

Then we decided that we wanted to sell a digital version of the book from our site, which sounds simple in principle, but in practice it was a complete programming nightmare and took over two months to get working. It seems that if you want to provide digital content, and you are using the latest version of Joomla, your options are quite limited. Plus we wanted a completely automated system that would take people’s credit card details and then send them an invoice with a link to the book instantly.

To cut a very long story short, firstly we chose a shopping cart that wasn’t really up to the job, even though they said it was, secondly we tried to install it ourselves (as it was supposed to be easy) and failed miserably and thirdly we tried to do all this without any real technical help. They say hindsight is a wonderful thing and if we could have predicted what a complete nightmare installing a shopping cart was going to be, we would have got technical help from the outset. There is definitely something to be said for getting an expert to help you with the things you aren’t very good at and it’s something we should have done from the start.

So if you are going to do something more complex than put up a simple website or blog, then get some help even if you have to pay for it, it is worth it and will save you a lot of pain and discomfort.

Here are links to more of our launch diaries

How to launch a book

Book Launch - Amazon Best Seller?

Book Launch - Power of Email Marketing

Marketing Book Launch

Book Launch - Harder than it looks