*** I thought I would repost this three-part blog from StGelais.com GBlog.NET category. It kind of fits right into this category too. ***
Part 2 - December 31, 2008 14:09
O.k., now I have 9,100 web pages (340 m.b.) pretty much ready to go. I did have to do some reworking of scripts and rerun them to get all of the pages loading correctly. You’re probably saying to you’re self right now, “How could he ‘debug’ the pages without a site?” Well, I laid out the frame work for the site in a couple of hours. I did it at the same time as the genealogy pages. Kind of designed the site for them.
It’s now a week later (December 12th) and I have a rough web site ready for testing. Since the change was a server based one, it was just a change in the IP address for StGelais.com. I had access to the new site, so I started to upload the new web site as it was. All of the pages were blank except for the Genealogy section. Now it was time to build the content for the rest of the site.
It was time to download the old site to my hard drive. I felt bad about the Guest Book having to go off-line and it lingered in the back of my mind. I needed that page! That was the only thing that I used from the old site. A had a basic style and went with it. Three paragraphs per page with alternating image placement. It was time to have FUN!!!
After setting up GiP with SEO design in mind, I was ready to let go! All of the images came from my network, with my daughter Brittany contributing a couple of her photos. I started on the default page and worked my way through the site. I wrote the text for each paragraph, found a photo I thought visually represented the text and added humorous ‘Alt’ tags. It was a blast, to say the least.
It is now December 19th. I get up at my usual early time (3:00-3:30 am) and go to FTP site to upload some changes and low and behold, my hosting provider has finalized the server change and completely over wrote the new site with the old one. Luckily, the genealogy directory was unique to the new site and was not erased. A quick delete of the old stuff and upload the new and away we go!!!
did it! The site was still quite rough, but I had made my deadline! As I said before, I never miss a deadline. It was time to clean up the site a little bit, so I spent that weekend tweaking here and there. But there was still no Guest Book. But then again, why not a Guest Blog? I needed one over at GiP, so why not do one here at StGelais.com? My quest was on. How I ended up finding the perfect blog engine on Christmas day, well that story is coming in my next post.
Till then...
Scott