A Post-Launch Post

What an exhausting week.  On Tuesday we had nothing but a broken version of the “Apparel” Portfolio page.  Last night, at 11:47pm I started uploading the finished files.  The index page went up about 13 seconds after midnight.  Everybody refreshed their browser and… the countdown page was still there?  Turns out GoDaddy has (more than) a couple issues with hosting.  This is something we all knew going into the launch, but we didn’t think it would have an affect on our site.

After all, it’s just XHTML/CSS with JS animation and one (okay, two) PHP scripts on the contact page.  The coding is pretty clean (and getting cleaner every day) and we tested the hell out of it.  Whenever an update was made on our test server (hosted by 1and1.com) it would appear on refresh.  For some reason this was not the case with GoDaddy.  Everybody had to clear their cache before they were able to see anything.  But it was there!  I was so relieved that I almost cried.

Two hours later, after some well-deserved celebration, Dylan regretfully informed me that he tested the contact form and still hadn’t gotten an e-mail.  Uh oh.  Turns out that GoDaddy had another issue (which we couldn’t solve after 3 beers and a long week) with PHP files that were uploaded via FTP, so we pointed the domain to the test server and now everything is running smoothly.

The moral of the story is: Test your live server before you go live!  If we hadn’t been doing last minute Photoshopping and padding, I would have had enough time to upload a dummy index file to see how it went.  My mistake.  In 5-10 days, however, our site will be hosted with 1and1.  They come highly recommended by me.

So be patient with the favicon and page titles.  They’re coming.