Hey everybody, Mike Linville here from Black Dog education with this weeks
installment of office hours where we answer your questions about web design web development
and online marketing. This week Ashley writes, Mike, I'm getting ready to start a website
redesign project and I'm not really sure how the whole process works do I need to backup
my data should I be making copies of my files I'm not really sure can you give me some ideas.
That's a great question. Website redesign project use to be an administrative nightmare
right because there's a couple of things we want to be able to do that are kinda counterintuitive
to me as a counter to each other. The first thing we want to do is want to make sure that
the new website is available online, it's web readable web accessible so that way the
client can look at the site they can review it and make comments and do whatever they
need to do before the site goes live. The other side of that though is we don't want
to take the old site down right because depending on the size of the project a website redesign
could take 6, 8, 10 weeks depending on how large is and you don't want your website to
be down for that long people can find your phone number they can't get a hold of you
that's not a good thing either okay. So there are ways around that but depend upon the host,
the new host the old host it can get a little time-consuming and get a little bit cumbersome
okay so we weren't happy with either solution so what we did is we came up with a new streamlined
process and it's actually pretty cool because it works out that it's faster and cheaper
than the old method and I like a lot. So we're going to come up with a cool name, but that's
neither here nor there. Now to be able to understand this is put on our little school
hats back on and go back and revisit two ideas, two topics about web 101, the first one is
we're going to talk about your website. Now remember your website, all the files the pages
the graphics the databases the forms everything they all live on a server somewhere on the
Internet and that location is identified by what's called an IP address. That's enough
for people to be able to find your website if they just have that number the problem
is is that looks horrible on business cards okay so that's where we come up with a second
topic which is domain names, what a domain name is really just a pointer. It is a record
in a database somewhere that says when someone types in this name send them over to that
server right. That's all it does is point it over to the server. That's how your domain
name and your web host are connected sometimes people think they're a one in the same they
are actually not they're separate elements okay so when we do a website redesign what
we're going to do is just 3 steps. The first thing we're going to do it is register a domain
name. If you can get close to your existing domain name, get maybe a .net instead of a
.com or put a hyphen somewhere in it, that's cool doesn't really matter, it's going to
be temporary. The second thing we're going to do is we're going to do the development
on the new domain name on the new host site and the third thing we're going to do is we're
going to redirect the old domain, the original domain back over to the new site when we're
ready. The cool part about that is it lets us go into the development where the site
is ultimately going to live, so we don't have any migration issues any software discrepancies
or anything like that. It let's us keep the old website up and running while you're doing
that redesigned and so you know if the project runs a little bit long you don't really have
to worry about that and if you're worried about somebody stopping by or stumbling across
a new site know if you're doing a WordPress redesign for example which I recommend this
is WordPress you can use something like a plugin maintenance mode and what that does
is for people that aren't logged in as administrator it'll just show a nice well designed, good-looking
coming soon page everybody else that has the login information will go and see the site
and can do whatever they need to do and the best part about this whole thing - super easy
to set up and it only cost like 10 bucks or whatever the cost of a domain name is, 8 bucks
if you have a coupon. So Ashley I hope that has helped you, I hope that has served you.
If you have any additional questions like this please make sure that you submit them
over on our Facebook wall, it's just Facebook.com/BlackDogEducation. If you like this video like it, share it,
pass it around with all your friends, put in some comments down below, this is Mike
Linville from Black Dog Education I wanna say thank you for stopping by. We'll see you
next time.