Well written automated tests will accrue value over time by saving you manual testing time (and increasing your confidence) with each release.
A lot depends on your situation at launch, but I think a lot of teams overestimate how much testing they should do, when in fact their bigger issue is not having enough customers, or not engaging their customers with a decent product.
If you have time, my suggestion would be to focus on a few items:
1) Notification tools to help you know when something goes wrong (e.g. email to the dev team). If you are using ruby, then http://hoptoadapp.com is a great tool, but if you can't find a tool, write your own. It's worth it.
2) Monitoring tools to know if the site is down (e.g. pingdom)
3) Figure out how to cleanly do site updates with zero downtime. This will let you fix the inevitable bugs without inconveniencing users who haven't hit the bug yet.
4) Write automated tests for the things that you think really can screw your users the most.
5) Develop a culture that, when you find bugs in production code, you write tests to reproduce them, then fix the bug, then use the test to validate the fix.
A lot depends on your situation at launch, but I think a lot of teams overestimate how much testing they should do, when in fact their bigger issue is not having enough customers, or not engaging their customers with a decent product.
If you have time, my suggestion would be to focus on a few items:
1) Notification tools to help you know when something goes wrong (e.g. email to the dev team). If you are using ruby, then http://hoptoadapp.com is a great tool, but if you can't find a tool, write your own. It's worth it.
2) Monitoring tools to know if the site is down (e.g. pingdom)
3) Figure out how to cleanly do site updates with zero downtime. This will let you fix the inevitable bugs without inconveniencing users who haven't hit the bug yet.
4) Write automated tests for the things that you think really can screw your users the most.
5) Develop a culture that, when you find bugs in production code, you write tests to reproduce them, then fix the bug, then use the test to validate the fix.
My two cents.