Time for lift-off: are you ready?

Time to launch your new website! It's the final countdown, are you ready for lift-off?

More than flipping a switch

Many things need to happen before your new website can go "live". This process of transitioning from your old website to the new can be tricky. To make sure there is absolutely no downtime during the switch, you need to know what you're doing.

For most companies, the biggest thing to keep in mind is the DNS settings at the registrar. The wizards behind the curtain, governing the link between human friendly addresses like syracusedesign.com and computer friendly IP addresses, such as 75.98.164.72, are hardly of any importance to most. What you need to know is that right now, yoursite.com is "pointing" to one hosting server, and you want to point that same domain name to your new website on your new hosting server. Most important of all, you have to make sure that there is no downtime during this transition.

Again, the process is tricky, but that's what web shops like Syracuse Design are for: we take care of all of these hassles. Launching hundreds of websites has made us pretty good bringing our product online without any hassles.

Other items to consider

The domain name trickery is only the beginning. We make sure all of the following are in order before we launch your website.

• Email
  What will happen to all of your emails once your site is launched? Can you still check iheartkittys@yourcompany.com after the site goes live, and your website is hosted at a new server? What about your old contact and emails - are they gone forever?
  
  
• Broken Links
  What about people that had your old webpages bookmarked? Or the links from external websites pointing to your website? Are the URLs of all pages on your old website the same as the URLs on your new website? Probably not. Hello 404, goodbye web visitor.
  
  
• SEO
  Search engines have indexed your old site, and are serving it up to users in search pages. How will Google know about your new site? How long before your new website shows up in search results?
  
  
• Analytics
  How will you be tracking your web traffic on your new website. How many people came from search engines, and what did they search for?
  
  
• Getting the word out
  How will you let your clients/stakeholders know about your new website? Is a traditional, printed Press Release enough? What about social media - will you be posting to Facebook and Twitter?
  
  
• Other domain names
  Who owns www.yourcompany.com? What about yourcompany.org, .net, .co, .info? Are you sure there is no yourcompany.xxx?

What if it all goes wrong?

We've seen it before. 

A recent website redesign we did went just about as badly as it could've. We created the new website, and set up hosting on our servers. The registrar, which the client chose to use, was a very popular company that we've had to interact with before. They stink. Everything they do gets botched, and this website launch was no exception.

Upon changing the DNS to our nameservers, it took over 2 weeks for the website to become live for everyone on the internet. During that time, you had about a 50/50 chance of seeing the old website. The only mistake that anyone made was using this particular registrar company.

The lesson here is that our experience with many, many registrars and hostings companies has given us a great perspective on who knows what they're doing, and who's out there to scam their customers. Our 10 years developing websites has given us the insight and experience necessary to avoid such problems in the future.

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