Launch day can be a stressful time for the website stakeholders: executives, investors, developers, project managers, editors, and anyone else who shares the joy (and/or pain) of a launch. The stakeholders might even be spread across multiple companies or institutions, if development and hosting are done by other people. The recent HealthCare.gov debacle highlights the importance of having a launch plan throughout your development process.
We'll discuss how to strategically prepare for site launches, and we'll talk about common launch blockers.
At Acquia and Pantheon, we’ve seen thousands of launches, and in many cases we’ve had to jump in and help ailing launches get back on track. We’ve learned a lot about what works, and sadly, what doesn’t work. Even the most painful failure can become a teaching tool, so let's turn some lemons into lemonade.
In this talk we’ll discuss these things:
- Low hanging fruit that can save your site’s bacon on launch day
- Common mistakes made that can hurt your site launch
- How debugging and load testing are an essential tools before a successful launch
- How agile development helps ensure rapid turnaround after launch
This session is appropriate for:
- Companies with site launches in their future
- Key decision makers looking to ensure their team is aware of launch pitfalls
- People with self-hosted sites curious about benefits of managed hosting and support
Comments
Looks great!
Will you have permission of some of your clients to talk about the particulars of specific projects? I think specificity will bring added value to your talk.
Hi Zach; Indeed, the talk
Hi Zach; Indeed, the talk will contain many sanitized examples from which we derived the recommendations. Names will be changed/omitted, of course, but I think the real-world failures are great teaching tools. I'm hopeful that the audience may also have some great examples, so we'll open it up after the presentation.
Howard is a great storyteller
Howard is a great storyteller, and I think that this session would make an interesting, informative and valuable addition to the schedule.
(Full disclosure: friend and former colleague, but this comment was in no way solicited)