In our previous three posts, “Project Comprehension“, “Designing a Great Website Mock-up“, and “Website Development” we outlined three steps of how we understand what you would like in website, how we design a mock-up to your website specs, and how we develop the website design into a functional easy to use website.
In this post, we’ll outline Part Four in a five part series entitled “Pushing a Website Live”. In this part of our web design process, we’ll be describing how we go about pushing the approved website “live”. Generally, here is what is covered under “Pushing a Website Live”:
- Backup of Development Website
- Moving Files to a “Live” Website
- Link Checking & Statistics Implementation
- Search Engine Submissions
Backup of Development Website
Once a client is happy with the website we’ve created and given us the go ahead, we’ll begin backing up all files and images created during the development process. If a website was created on a content management system (CMS) platform we’ll also backup the database used to store website data. If a client has a pre-existing site we’ll back this up as well.
Moving Files to a “Live” Website
Once all backups are made from the development site, it’s time to upload all those files to the main domain our client have selected. This could be located on our server if they have signed up for our hosting service, or on the hosting provider, our clients have predetermined. Next, we change the root location where the website is located in the database if a website uses a database. From there, we move files from development location to root location (main domain location).
Link Checking & Statistics Implementation
When all files have been transferred to the desired domain location, we scan the website to make sure all links are linking to the areas they should be linking to. We’ll also make sure images are showing up where they should. After all, links are double checked we usually implement some sort of statistics program so our clients can see who is visiting their website and from where they are visiting. We prefer Google Analytics for this.
Search Engine Submissions
When we have deemed a website to be completely functional, we’ll then start submitting them to search engines for indexing. The big three we submit to are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Keep in mind that it does take time for a website to be indexed by certain search engines, so, therefore, will not show up in search queries for a time between a couple weeks to three months.
Stay tuned next time when we cover part five in this five part series entitled “Updates For a Living Website“.