Part 5: Website Launch & Cleanup
Okay, you have your website all designed and it looks phenomenal. So you want your designer to flip the switch and put it live. Hmmm, let’s think about that for a second.
First, let’s consider the day of the week. I like to launch a new website on Fridays – usually in the morning – so that we have the entire weekend to “clean up” anything that isn’t working quite right. Your designer may feel differently. But, it’s not always as easy as just uploading some files and walking away. If you’re not over-writing all the existing files that are currently on the website, they need to be addressed.
Here’s how we do it. If the client wants a copy of his old website, we’ll download the site for him. Then we upload all our new files – including the robot.txt file, and htaccess file, if needed, etc. We check the website to make sure everything is displaying properly. Some servers are “case sensitive” so a photo named Photo.jpg that was entered as photo.jpg on the page could show as a broken graphic. Typically, we avoid this problem by making sure that we use case sensitivity when creating the website, but things can still go wrong.
If all looks well, we will need to check the server for “orphaned” pages – old pages that were not replaced and remove them. (The 301 redirects and robot.txt file will address the issue to the search engines so there’s no need to leave them – see part 4 of this article for more info.)
Then we create an xml sitemap for the website and upload it to the server. With the xml sitemap in place, we can now add the site to our Google webmaster account and submit that sitemap. This will help Google update its datacenters a bit more quickly. (Google will also ask us to verify ownership of the website by uploading at Google validation file.)
We should test the forms to make sure that the you receive the inquiries – if that goes well, then the new website is officially launched and ready to be promoted.
Read part 6 to learn why your website needs to be promoted.