You’ve been working for months on migrating your content to your new Drupal website, and now the time has nearly arrived. You’re almost ready to launch.
Congratulations!
At this point, you’re hopefully feeling excited — and maybe a little nervous. What will happen after you launch? Is there anything you can do now to help the launch go smoothly?
To help you prepare, we asked your fellow website leads to share their wisdom.
Here’s what they had to say (as well as a few tips of our own):
Things You Can Do Before Launch
Convince Stakeholders to Make the New Website a Priority
- “Start talking about [a specific timeframe for launching your new site] as soon as possible to content owners, [senior leadership] and in general. Giving people a date to work towards brought the website higher up in their to-do lists…It shifted the thinking about the existing content from ‘this is our starting point’ to ‘this is what will be going up unless specific choices are made otherwise.'”
Compile a List of Your Sub-Sites
- If your current website is hosted by Arts & Science IIT, you’ll need to provide a list of any sub-sites (e.g., for conferences, journals, etc.) they currently host to ensure these sites are not disrupted by the launch. Not sure what a sub-site is? It usually has a URL such as “journal.yourwebsite.utoronto.ca” or “yourwebsite.utoronto.ca/journal.” If you’re still not sure, please contact us for clarification.
- If your current website is not hosted by Arts & Science IIT, you’ll need to determine whether you’ll continue to pay your existing provider to host these sub-sites. Alternatively, you could contact Arts & Science IIT to ask if they are able to host these websites instead. Either way, be sure to get in touch with your existing host to let them know of any needed changes to your hosting agreement.
Choose an Appropriate Launch Date
- You’ll need to give the Arts & Science web liaison team 2-3 weeks’ notice that you are ready to launch. This will give us time to review your site page-by-page for any critical issues (accessibility violations, blank pages, etc.). There are also some final decisions and approvals you’ll need to make (e.g., meta descriptions for key pages, etc.).
- We’ll get in touch with our colleagues in Arts & Science IIT to confirm their availability for the launch. Launches follow the same general timeframe:
- End-of-day Thursday before launch: Content freeze phase begins.
- Friday before launch: IIT completes final checks and preparations.
- Over the weekend: IIT initiates the launch. It can take up to 24 hours for the new website to be visible to everyone.
- Monday morning: The official launch date.
- Make sure there are no application deadlines (or other crucial dates) during your preferred launch timeframe.
Prepare for the Content Freeze
A few days before your site launches, you’ll need to stop making any changes to your site. We call this stage “the content freeze.” One website lead offered a tip for this stage:
- “I informed the people who edit the site (or request edits) about the content freeze as soon as I had a firm date. I also sent an email to our internal list (staff, faculty and PhDs) the Friday before the launch letting them know that it would be happening that Sunday, warning that the website would be down for a short period of time, and cautioning that bumps are to be expected with this type of change.”
What to Expect After Launch
Consider a Soft Launch
Thinking of emailing your entire department to let them know your new site has launched? According to one website lead, you may want to choose a two-staged approach instead:
- “I suggest a soft launch to anyone who manages or owns content on the site before driving traffic to the site – it will give the team time to test and update everything, then after a week or two, announce it publicly.”
Manage Expectations (and Your Workload)
Consider setting an out-of-office message in Outlook for the day of your launch, or longer:
- “Once our new site was live, I received many edit requests – mostly bio/profile updates and any other content or deadlines that had changed since the content owners first submitted their content.”
- “I asked that people send feedback or problems to [our department’s] generic…email instead of my individual email, which allowed me to set up an automatic reply for the week after the launch. I didn’t get a deluge of emails, but I think this helped to manage expectations.”
End Your Hosting Agreement With Non-A&S Providers
- If your previous website was hosted by Arts & Science IIT, no action is required from you. However, if you were hosted by another provider (e.g., U of T Academic and Collaborative Technologies), you are responsible for contacting them to end your hosting agreement after your new website launches.
Maintain Your Site’s Quality and Accessibility
- Help keep your site accessible by periodically running it through a free accessibility checker. (We recommend Achecker.) These automated checkers can’t catch everything because some accessibility issues have to be reviewed manually, but they will point you in the right direction.
- The day of launch, we’ll run your site through a couple of free broken-link checkers and share the results with you. We recommend you continue to check for broken links on a regular basis – at least monthly. We like DeadLinkChecker.com and BrokenLinkCheck.com. These free sites check a limited number of links, so they may not catch everything — but they will save you plenty of time with zero cost.
- When your new site launches, Arts & Science IIT sets up a global redirect. This means if someone tries to visit your old homepage, they’ll be taken to your new homepage. However, if they try to visit a sub-page on your previous website, they will be brought to your new website’s 404 page, where they can easily look for the correct page. This is a common approach during a website redesign, but it does require a bit more legwork from people who are trying to access links to your previous website. To mitigate this, the Arts & Science Web Liaison team will set up one-to-one redirects for a limited number of key pages on your site (i.e., people who try to visit one of these key pages will be brought to the equivalent page on your new website). In addition, you may wish to reach out to other departments to request they update any links to your website.
- If multiple people are responsible for your site’s content, consider setting team guidelines to keep content fresh over time— for example, “who does what updates and when, how often to purge old content/pdfs/banners, etc.”
- Be sure to review our guidelines for selecting and cropping homepage slider images.