Forum Moderators: phranque
Just out of professional curiosity, the day you officially launch your site, what do you personally do?
Sure you've tested it all for weeks viewed it on every monitor and platform you can get in front of, but the WHAT IF drives me nuts. It takes about a week after to calm down.
I had a customer stolen by someone who put something together in Dreamweaver. They did it for free (a family member, I'm presuming.) For the first week it had a Javascript error on the main page. I would just DIE! :-)
No offence to the "click and sweat" crowd but the majority of your testing should happen before anything is uploaded.
Upload all the files to the w3c validator first then load and test the whole site on a private server. Much easier on the blood pressure than "click and sweat" ;-)
No offence to the "click and sweat" crowd . . .
We don't sweat. We PERSPIRE. (- Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester, sorta)
And if you read the response, we've been testing for weeks. If you care anything about what you do, it STILL doesn't make launch day any less stressful. Sometimes stuff happens in the live environment you can't predict.
Exactly, well put. That and the small differences between my development setup and the hoster setup, sometimes different apache, sometimes different php, different paths. Then the combinations of clicks that you just never thought of but that site users manage to find anyway, aka bugs.
I find that finding these bugs happens much faster once the site is live, the owners have motivation to find them at that point, which they don't before, try as I might to get them to test a test version. So I tend to just try to get it live as soon as the stuff is in working order, then once data is flowing through it all those little fixes can happen. Can't do real testing without real user data, all you can do is try to minimize the problems before going live.
Murphy is an end user :)
That is so beautifully put it should be part of your epitaph. Seriously, I've printed that line and taped it to the wall. If ever there was a wise and witty one-liner, that's it. Bravo, kevin.
cEM
Murphy is an end user :)
rocknbil:
Per my mother (to whom I still respond: Yes Mom, right away Mom ...):
"Beasts sweat, men perspire, women glisten, ladies glow."
"Going live" is for me a similar feeling to watching a space launch - I know everything tested fine but at the same time I fully expect a catastrophic explosion.
The week after launch is: follow every link, read every log, live test: site search, forms, interfaces, etc., etc., etc.
Once that first week is over I can breath (again) and settle into a rhythm of maintenace, SEO, and marketing. And start/continue the next project.
The week following launch is truly The Agony and the Ecstasy.
There remains one inescapable detail ......
Murphy is an end user :)
{probably wouldn't be anywhere without her input but that's just between us}
I make sure to go through each level of the site, have a third party complete a test order (for ecommerce), test the site some more, send out a newsletter annoucing the launch, build some links and sleep for a week.
