Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

Launching websites is one of the best parts of our work, because it is so tangible - many agencies have fresh designs, fresh content, fresh features - or all three - and seeing them available on the internet is exciting.

The actual launch has lot of moving pieces though - here’s a quick primer:

There are 3 moving pieces in most website launches:

1. Where the site is physically hosted
2. Who owns the name (for instance www.mynonprofit.org)
3. Who manages the Dynamic Name Server information (also referred to as DNS)

Your new site will be physically located in a new spot – on servers that we lease and manage for our nonprofit customers. To make your site launch, we’ll need to change some DNS settings on your behalf. You can think of it like changing your address at the post office –we need to “point” your name (www.mynonprofit.org) to the new physical location.

Sometimes, your current webhost manages all three of those moving pieces, sometimes just one or two.

So – here’s the 64 dollar question for us:

Do you know and have access to the agency or vendor that managers your DNS? Oftentimes it is someone such as www.networksolutions.com, or www.godaddy.com. Both of those vendors have easy to manage control panels that allow us (or you) to make those changes. We prefer to have access to making those changes ourselves. In the past, it’s been challenging to troubleshoot when we didn’t have access. For instance, one agency was able to change their www.mynonprofit.org to the new site – but didn’t change their http://mynonprofit.org to the new site – so they had TWO publically available sites! And – if you are getting your email from a third party –we want to make sure that we don’t change those settings, either. And some agencies have multiple names that all are supposed to be pointing to the same spot -so it can be a challenge if we don’t have the access we need for a successful launch.

And some notes about the actual launch:

When we’re ready (that means you’re designs and content are all in place and you’ve told us to launch), it can take up to 36 hours for those changes to propagate throughout the internet. We can make those changes at anytime – but usually try to do so near the end of the day, and often on a Thursday or Friday – 3:00 or 4:00 PM – so that most of that propagation can take place after business hours. But if you have a sense that your website visitors will be using your site during those hours – we could also make those changes earlier in the day.