00:00 on Saturday 10^th January 2009 was meant to be the launch of the new site for Monster, the UKs largest jobs board. I was talking to a friend of mine online last night and they pointed me to the site where there was a countdown to the big launch. I watched the seconds tick down to midnight eagerly awaiting a great new site. Midnight came and went and the countdown was at 0 days 0 hours 0 minutes and 0 seconds and I waited, and waited and waited. No new site just a timer. I finally went to bed confused as to why the new site hadn’t launched on time.

At the time of writing this post things have got even worse for Monster. As you can see from the screenshot below the site is now completely unavailable.

What went wrong?

Perhaps Monster’s major mistake was basing their site launch on a very strict launch date, further hyped by a countdown timer. This was no doubt due to some very black and white deadlines they had and no doubt a marketing campaign around it. However, if the site wasn’t ready then Monster should have taken the embarrassment of removing the counter and then waiting until they were ready to launch before they did the switch over. I imagine now there will be thousands of job hunters who will be having a very frustrating weekend.

However well you prepare for a site launch there is always a possibility that something may go wrong from server issues to demand levels (this has also been seen this weekend with the launch of Windows 7 beta which is no unavailable due to too much load on their servers). For this reason we always advise clients not to launch sites out of core business hours and weekends because unless your development team is available 24/7 then it is very difficult to quickly rectify any problems that may occur.

This very high profile disaster has really highlighted the importance of handling web launches well. Deadlines do sometimes slip for a whole range of reasons but the balance of launching a great site that works and meeting clients external deadlines is a difficult one.

I will watch with interest and update you on what happens.