Up..up…and fail
Today we tried to launch our new district website which has been giving me fits since I started migrating to the new server. I have invested a lot of work and personal time into it, knowing full well that a website is never 100% complete. I think I had it at about 90% complete Sunday night until Monday when I realized that the big three pages (pages with lots of online forms) had to be converted over. So I spent the day fixing those and completed the third one today.
We pulled the plug at noon which I consider like the show “Lost” to be “moving the island”. To move a site, you have to change the IP address through the Network Associates site which directs all www traffic. We followed the directions and was informed that it would take up to 72 hours to replicate through all the servers that make up the www.
This is normal. This is part of the protocols that define the structure of the web and I had informed my supervisors and all staff that this would be happening.
Then the abnormal happened. None of the external emails were delivered to us. Vendors were calling that their emails were being rejected. Then links to other pages shorted out. And people could see the new site on the outside of the district but inside we had a page error. I am sure other districts have all their links on their site for gradebook, attendance, sub finder, etc. So when those aren’t available, people freak.
Moving the island isn’t so easy.
Now we are reverting back to the old page to figure out the kinks. I am sort of happy this happened because of my stake in the website. I want it to be at 100% when it is released but I also know that the only way that will happen is to use my Spring Break vacation to do it. And I know that if I do that, I will burn out very quickly in this job and that will not be good for anyone. I did correct three major errors and a typo on the main site this afternoon before I went to workout, so today’s errors had a lighter side to them.
The hard part is to come when a new site is really released. When a new website goes into effect, the entire world-wide web gets to publicly view the gaps in our information structure. The floodgates open to a new perspective of a district’s public information profile. A new website isn’t just a pretty face, it’s a cold slap of reality.
I’m not looking forward to it. I don’t like publicized failure. I don’t like failure, really.
March 11th, 2009 at 12:01 am
That sucks, Joel. I feel your pain. My new job has me as the ISD webmaster. While I know little to nothing about CSS, PhP, and other things (I know some HTML), I did know I could find a nice support group in the Joomla forums. I chose Joomla as the foundation, built the site completely offline using some really nice cheap templates (well, the same one used on each of the five sites), a Joomla book from Amazon to find the new things in Joomla, and a lot of luck. We did the full switch. Things went well. I did warn the staff that they might see formatting issues on their sites that they might want changed, so be prepared to look and ask (or just fix it themselves).
Good luck with your own changeover. Mine was done over a two week period going well into the early morning hours the entire time. If I can help out in any way, I’m available.