One ongoing project has involved the launching of a brand new site with plenty of interactivity, some curious AI security functionalities, and plenty of user-generated contents, along with professionally created contents. The ambition of the site meant that the coding would likely take longer than initially planned. And the many voices at the table would also mean more delays.

Loading Contents

To push the site’s development, while the site was still in development, a version was pushed out into production…in order to test the code. The idea was to put up the contents that had been in development for over half a year by a number of individuals, to see where the code would break. Where would the images not deploy accurately? How would links be made to work or not? How could text be displayed in a way to work with the design?

The cracks started coming early, with some images not deploying in a way that represented the contents well. The slow loading of the site by a tester out-of-state encouraged him to quip that he would not necessarily stay with the site for the contents. And there was that data-hungry aspect again—the giant maw of a new website with plenty of needs.

Understanding the Site Development Cycle

It was interesting to watch the team struggle with the patience needed to evolve a site. There was clearly not an understanding of the amount of back-end development work needed to evolve the functionalities or interactivity of a site. And the challenges of the site build were mystifying to many.

Hitting a link and going straight to code was disconcerting to some. And not having certain functionalities didn’t “speak” to some team members as concerning—in terms of there being some pretty big black holes without the back-end coding.

Differentiating between the test environment of the dev site and the live production site was also confusing for many. The new coding would be built in development, tested, and then deployed…with the uploaded contents protected on the server.

Something Half-Live

There was definitely something positive of going partially live because finally all the work and hopes manifested in something on the WWW. And it helped to have something tangible to “shadow box” in terms of ideas. How was the screen real estate being used? Were the fonts showing correctly and effectively? What editing should be done with the contents? Would users find the site helpful? Friendly? Navigable? Informative?

The next step is to take this fully live…once the various systems have been created and tested.