{"id":50173,"date":"2016-03-10T16:00:51","date_gmt":"2016-03-10T15:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/main\/?p=50173"},"modified":"2016-03-10T16:00:51","modified_gmt":"2016-03-10T15:00:51","slug":"new-website-rollout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/main\/new-website-rollout\/","title":{"rendered":"New website? What have you missed?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"no-entry\"<\/p>\n

So you’ve developed a shiny new website to perform a particular function for your customers. It replaces a working, but rather visually dated, site. <\/p>\n

What are the most important things to do before you put it live?<\/p>\n

Well, testing it, for one thing. Ensuring that you have a rollback option, so that you can put the previous version back up if you need to, is also important. And checking that all your surrounding processes still work OK is a third.<\/p>\n

I recently had cause to log in to a particular site (let’s call this X), which is owned by a large company (let’s call them A). I noticed that the design of the site had changed since I’d last logged in 10 days ago – all the content had been removed from the home page, leaving only two options: log in, or create a new account. No other links or text on the page at all…<\/p>\n

So I tried – and failed – to log in. I tried again. I tried resetting the password, several times. Still nothing worked.<\/p>\n

So I called company A, whose customer service team put me through to the department responsible for X. Sadly, the call went to an answerphone message, which said: check the FAQ on site X [remember that all content on X is now behind the login page, which doesn’t work] or call company A. <\/p>\n

Since there are no contact details or any other information available on site X, I have no option but to keep trying to call company A.<\/p>\n

Having looped through this several times in the last few days, one of the customer service team at company A managed to get through to the X department, who said something like: “oh yes, there’s a problem with site X, we’re working on a fix and it should be back up in 4 days”. That is, 4 days from today, not from the day when the problem was first observed – which, if I were the first person to spot it, was 4 days ago. <\/p>\n

That’s at least 8 days that website X is non-functional.<\/p>\n

Lessons to be learned?<\/p>\n