Tuesday, February 07, 2006

A proud day!

Yesterday, Monday, we launched a new version of The Image Connection. Graphics and layout changes had been done mostly last year in December. We tried to launch then, but it had never been fully tested. This was somewhat our pattern. Well, the bosses finally had enough of launching without testing when all our users called up and complained for a week.

So I printed out guidelines, and forms for testing of beta applications. This was a long time in coming, and I had been collecting and creating this stuff for a while. So when they said, 'we need a better launch procedure', I was ready.

We obviously took the site down, and put the old one back up. But we put the new one into a beta site and had users test and retest, as me and our new programmer fixed the bugs. (Yes we had bugs. Things that were by design but they didn't like. No real broken things though... RIGHT!)

So, we launched yesterday, and other than a couple of minor launch quirks (virtual directories not pointing in the right direction) it seems to be a success. Now there are some features that we wanted to launch that we didn't, but the site works and orders are flowing.

I will post to my site some of the guidelines I came up with and documentation. Yes, we have been documenting everything, from which code uses certain component libraries we've created, to Requirements Documents for anything we touch. It's not there, but it's a beautiful thing.

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