Welcome to WordPress Without a Developer. I'm Rob Howard, and this is The Launch Mindset. Today we're gonna talk about what you should be thinking about and how you should be framing your journey from your starting point to launching a WordPress site that you've built yourself. 

This means that you're not necessarily thinking about every possible thing that could happen six months or a year or two years down the road, but you're thinking about what do I need to do to get to a point where this is good enough to launch, I'm gonna be proud of it. It may not be everything that I want and it may not be absolutely perfect from top to bottom, but it gets the job done and I can do it myself, and I can use this experience to build the knowledge that I'm gonna need to grow and improve down the road. 

The first thing I want you to think about is what is the one purpose of your website? I want you to choose one thing because as soon as you start to choose multiple things, you start to confuse some of the decision you're gonna make down the road, and you start to kinda push that launch point farther and farther back in a way that I think is negative for your business overall. 

Here are a few examples. One obvious one is to make a retail sale. If you have a product, the purpose of your website could be to sell that product and receive a transaction, and then you would ship it out. You might also make a digital sale, kinda like the one that you could make with this course, where you're buying something online, and then you're getting something delivered to you online. 

On the simpler side, it could just be a business card. For my consulting website, it's truly a business card, and it was actually a very simple business card for many years, and that was good enough for me. It could be a page or two or five that just has information about you and a way to contact you. 

A third item could be that you wanna capture mailing list subscribers. For example, for some of my other businesses, I've built sites that are really just one page. The whole purpose of this page is to get you to subscribe to a mailing list if it's a good fit for you, and that's it. There's really nothing more to the site. It's one page with some long copy and a mailing list signup form at the top and at the bottom. There is a very clear, simple purpose to that site. 

The last one you can think about it social sharing. If you have a blog, for example, your goal may just be to drive traffic to that site. It may be that this site is also a business card or also has a mailing list on it. But I want you to really think about what is your primary focus, and make that the exclusive focus of your project until the point where you launch. Then you can build on it down the road if you want to, but the goal here is really to extremely tightly focus what you're doing because it's gonna make your decisions a lot easier as you get started. 

I also want you to kind of, this may go against your instincts a little bit, but I want you to not think 10 steps ahead. I want you to think in terms of what works for me today because the good thing about websites is that it's pretty easy to change things once you've launched and once you've proven a concept. What's really difficult is if you're spinning your wheels for six months and you're not launching anything. You actually don't have data about your customers or your visitors to make good decisions. So you're in this infinite loop of should I do this, or maybe I should use this plugin. It's just not a useful process or mental framework for you to go with. 

Throughout this course, I'm gonna give you options that I consider to be equally good, right, for your purposes. I'm gonna drive you away from some things that I think actually are poor options or poor software. But most things are good enough for you today, so it's about what works for me today. Specifically not about, well, what if in two years I have 100,000 visitors and this doesn't work for me anymore or it doesn't scale for me? Don't go there. That is a distraction from your goal today, which is to get a solid website up that functions for you, gets you clients or customers, and gets this task off of your to-do list. You can always expand down the road, but I don't want you to get distracted by kind of shiny objects and a million different options, and I don't want you to get into analysis paralysis. 

Two more quick concepts here. Your visitors don't know what's in your head. If they see a pretty attractive, good looking site that works, they're gonna be happy with that. They don't have your vision, so remember that nobody but you can read your mind, so you don't need to be fiddling with pixels throughout this process and fiddling with these reminder things because ultimately most visitors are gonna be on your site for 30 seconds to three minutes at the most. Don't freak out about perfection because they are not thinking about that. They're thinking about is this product or service right for me? The site looks pretty good. It seems professional. Let's hit that contact form or let's hit that mailing list or let's buy that product. It's not this painstaking thing that's happening, oftentimes, in our own heads. When the visitors visit the site, it's a very quick experience, so you really wanna avoid that level of intricacy and perfectionism, at least at this stage of the game. 

My designer friends would hate me for saying this, but the truth is that pretty much all websites look the same, right, at a certain point. You've got something like 80% or 90% similarity between every site on the internet. Everything else is a flourish. Get it to look solid, get it looking good. It's okay that it's not the most unique or special thing in the world at this stage of the game because your goal is not to have a website that looks like nothing else. It's to have a website that is in the top 20% of quality of all the websites that your visitors or customers are gonna see. They have a certain type of site that they're used to. You wanna basically hit those key points, and then say this is good enough for me right now. You want a website that accomplishes the one purposes that we talked about: get 'em on a mailing list, get 'em into a contact form. You want something that's attractive on both desktop and mobile. 

We'll talk about many themes that can do this for free or for a matter of 25 or $50 investment down the road. Most importantly, you need a website that is live as soon as possible. The longer you wait and the longer you fiddle with the options, the fewer opportunities you have to bring customers in, the fewer opportunities you have to get feedback from those people, and most importantly, it just is not valuable to you until it is online and doing its job. 

Next up, we're gonna dive into a few things that seem very attractive, but that I actually want you to not think about. In our next segment, we're gonna build our not-to-do list.