Question

How about a checklist of things that need doing before I send actual users (even my closest friends) to my site?

Answer 1

I would say:

• Know Why: This is critical. This is what Tammy did first. She sat down and wrote an "about" page that explained why (and how) this site was going to make people's lives better. You'd better be convinced yourself. Come up with specific examples of what is wrong with the status quo. Turn this into an About page.
• License: Pick a license. I only say this because it's probably almost legally impossible to change your license after the fact, so decide if it's a CC license or if you own everything, or what.
• Attribution: If you do choose an open license, I suggest the attribution page as well. I blatantly stole the idea from Jeff Atwood and StackOverflow, basically because it prevents someone from just dumping your site and cloning it later (well, legally anyway). It won't matter at the beginning, but it's very easy, so why not do it.
• Share Feature: Make sure you include some easy mechanism for visitors to share their site with friends. We used the AddThis button because it was so easy and compact. You definitely want a way to share by email, and then make sure you know how the people in your target community will communicate, and make sure that's covered. Remember, personal referrals are the most effective way to spread the word because we trust our friends to not spam us with irrelevant information.
• Logo: Must be 250x69 pixels. Doesn't have to be complicated. If you have no design sense, consider running a competition on 99designs but make sure you don't ask for anything complicated. Stylized text is about the best most of them can do. Anything more complicated and I guarantee that parts of it will be plagiarized. If you want to go cheap, just use your favorite drawing package. I actually did ours in XAML (you use the tools you know) and just did a screenshot. If anyone wants the XAML to start with, email me at scott {at} moms4mom.com and I'll email you the file. You'll need Visual C# Express at least though. You can also customize your favicon (32x32).
• Theme: Pick a color scheme. I suggest getting a designer involved. If not, I suggest finding two complementary colors on the color wheel that look good, and just go lighter and darker for each one from there. I suggest trying to do something as different as possible. Background image? Sure why not (not an actual StackExchange site).
• Analytics: Get Google Analytics installed in the footer of your site. Make sure you configure it to exclude your own visits.
• FAQ: Customize the FAQ for your audience. Also, write some faq tagged questions and answers of your own to help people who might have a question about how to use your site. You're welcome to take any of the ones from moms4mom (if you follow the attribution requirements, of course! :)
• Ad-Spots: You can hide them or you can put something worthwhile in them. We used the banner spot for an AddThis button. The sidebar has a mission statement, a share button, and the facebook fan page badge. The banner-low has a message saying you can ask a question anonymously (I was hoping to get some of the googlers to ask more questions, but as far as I can tell, it's not working at all). The sidebar-low is a great place to trade topic links with other StackExchange sites.
• Questions: We found people are much more willing to answer a question than to ask a question. You may find that questions are more valuable than answers to your early site because it encourages participation. Get a good list of questions from your friends or people in the community. Ask them if they'd be willing to post the question themselves.
• Tags: Anyone can create a tag before there are 100. Figure out what general categories you want to have, and be ready to retag as the questions are asked. Fill in the example tags in the customization section.
• Ask for help: Join the other administrators over at the StackExchange Google Group. That'll give you a direct connection to us by email, we can share more detailed information than would be applicable on meta.SE, and we can get to know each other. Also join our petition to get Joel to spring for a StackExchange Administrator party in either Vegas or Hawaii. :)

Don't be afraid to tell people early. It doesn't have to be perfect. You can edit it any time.

Good luck!

Answer 2

Fix the colors! The current (beta) default colors will subject you to a lot of abuse.

Instructions

Answer 3

Ad Spots

You could put something in them, like ads, or your mission statement, or anything you want to show up on pretty much every page.

If you do want to put up ads, you're probably going to want to use some kind of ad manager as they are just divs.

Alternatively, you can just make them go away by using some CSS like this:

.portholes {
    display: none;
}

It's important to remember that the banners are only shown to newish users, so you will probably want to browse your site logged out so you get the anonymous experience to test your banners.

Logo and Favicon

admin->theme->Logo and Favicon</tt>: Upload some pictures and change them.

The system does not scale/crop/rotate or perform any contortions to make your logo fit the layout. If you want your logo to fit the layout, it should be 250x69 pixels if you upload something a lot bigger, or a lot smaller, it will probably look kind of funky. Maybe that's what you want, if not use your graphics editor to size it to 250x69.

Look at your logo in context, and make sure it's aligned. If your logo has a lot of text in it, it should probably be centered with the row of buttons next to it.

FAQ

The site's FAQ is a static page (under admin->content->Static Pages) which uses StackOverflow's FAQ as a template.

You should read through it and make it your own... or at the very least fill in the blanks (and in sites created on certain versions of the code, replace the string "%(domain)s" with something like your site's name).

Other Stuff

There's a bunch of stuff under admin->content->Html Customization you should look it over and make sure the verbiage is to your liking (The welcome message has a blank and the tag examples are: "tag another-tag a-much-better-tag". Both probably need changing).

As an aside, much like the banners, the welcome message is only shown to newish users so you'll need to browse your site without being logged in to see it.

Answer 4

Make sure users get answers to their questions (or they won't come back). Make sure you've got a core group of people lined up, checking the site regularly, and working hard to answer questions (even if they have to run off and research the answers) for the first few days.

Answer 5

Seed the site with some questions to get the ball rolling. Have something for new users to sink their teeth into as well as finding out what kind of questions the site is wanting to gear toward.

Answer 6

You should write the text for your FAQ page and other static pages you plan to have (an "about" page perhaps). Your SE site comes with a default FAQ page, but you'll probably want to change much of it. The default editing-help page is fine as is.

Here are some static pages you might want (this is Community Wiki, so feel free to add to the list):

• Editing help (just the default)
• FAQ
• Known Issues (list of bugs users should know about). You don't really need to write this in advance.
• Attribution page. In my case, I'm using the cc-wiki license, and this page is to explain how to cite site content. I guess this would be a licensing page in general.
• News. If you don't have a separate blog for the site, you can make a news page.
• Beta. A page explaining that the site (and the underlying software) is in beta, so users should be forgiving and report bugs (if they aren't already on the known issues page). I also have a system message screaming to people that the site is beta and linking to this static page.

Answer 7

The customer is always right. Joel said it best.

I would concentrate your efforts on the community. Watch the questions that come in, of course try to answer them, but also edit, clean, and re-tag to your liking. Keep everything organized, and your members happy.