by Dorottya Dvorak 
Whether you’re launching a whole new website for your company, or just considering making changes to your existing pages, it’s always best to prepare well in advance and first of all, make a list of what you’d need to look out for.
Our checklist will help you make sure you’re not forgetting anything for your initial preparation:
- Define what is changing on your website and how that will affect your Pardot assets.
- Audit your existing landing pages, forms and email templates and delete any unused ones.
- Create a master spreadsheet of all of your live Pardot assets which can be used as your reference point for the launch.
- If your link structure is changing as well, include the existing and new links in your master spreadsheet.
- Make a list of the layout templates you’d need to work on for the different campaigns you’re running.
- Store your old files on Pardot and change their link in your email and layout templates now.
Let’s see these steps in more detail:
The main question you should ask yourself at this point is ‘What is changing on our website?‘. The most common responses are:
- Fresh Design: Most popular reason for a website launch is modernisation which could mean big changes to your branding guidelines, including your main colours, font family or even your logo.
- New Company Name: Your company might be going through some major changes that could result in a brand new name for your company. This would affect everything on your website: the url, the logo and your whole online profile.
- Simple Structure: Your current website might be too crowded and visitors are leaving your website without converting. It’s time to rethink how your website is organised, simplifying your navigation and website structure for a better user experience.
As you work with your design agency and developers on the overall design and technical aspects of your new website, as the marketing automation expert think of which tasks you should complete to get ready for launch. Depending on what is changing on your website, your Pardot assets may need to be changed as well. Your company branding is used in all of your email templates, forms and landing pages, including the logo, fonts and brand colours plus links to your website that might now need updating.
To get started, we’d recommend auditing your Pardot assets immediately. Export all of your landing pages, forms, email templates, nurture templates and autoresponders into one master spreadsheet and go through your assets one by one, marking which ones should stay. Once you have your list, go into Pardot and delete the ones that you no longer need – they can be restored from the Recycle Bin if needed – so you don’t waste time updating assets that are not in use.
Keep your audited spreadsheet for the week of the launch, so you can keep track of what you have updated and ensure you’re not forgetting anything.
In case there are any changes involved in your launch to the domain name or the website structure, you should include all of the existing links in your assets, and add the new versions to the next column of your spreadsheet. This will make your job easier when you need to update everything in Pardot during the launch.
Go and check your Pardot layout templates as well, and only keep the ones that should be updated with the new design. Make a list of all the different layouts you might need to work on, specific templates optimised for your forms, event registration pages or gated content downloads.
But you can also think it’s best to start from scratch; in that case I recommend to take a look at Pardot’s built-in responsive templates and adjust the styling to make the template aligned with your new design. Having a responsive site is essential today, as Adobe says “Nearly 8 out of every 10 consumers would stop engaging with a piece of content if it didn’t display well on the device they were using”
Review the code of your Pardot emails and layout templates and look for any old files (logos or white papers) that are hosted on your current website as these might not be available after launch. Upload those files to your new site (or Pardot) and link back to them in your Pardot assets – you can do this anytime before launch to save you a job when you go live.
Now that your to-do list for preparations are done, let’s see the implications for the tracking settings as part of the Website Launch for Pardot series.