Steps To Go-Live w/o George

[00:00] Hey folks. So I want to quickly go over what will be happening when it comes to rolling out the site. So if you guys decide that you want to go for it, this is what the steps would be.

[00:10] So if this pages thing makes you nervous, watch the other video that's the crash course. But this basically is the way that Webflow sees the whole site structure.

[00:20] So pages is effectively the root. We have the home page. Some of the pages that are already live, right, the surveys, forms, behavior management, and talent are all live pages right now.

[00:30] And then after that there are a couple of folders, right. We also have this how we help folder, which also has a live page in it. It has the district leadership page.

[00:40] The reason it's in a folder is that that way the structure will be slash, you know, how - we - help slash district leadership or who we help, sorry.

[00:50] But okay. So let's say it's time to roll out the new site. You're feeling good about everything.

[01:00] And you're like, let's push it. So the first thing that would need to happen is you'd want to go into each of these and basically start moving them into the root.

[01:10] So in here for parent folder, you'd switch it to none. And you want to make sure that you don't do a redirect.

[01:20] All right. So you want to uncheck that. And then it should switch to public automatically.

[01:30] And that will move the page out of dev and put it into the live root folder for the home's page. Specifically, you'd want to also do another step, which is come in and click this move or make home page right now.

[01:40] It's inside of the folder. So it's yelling at me. But in reality, it would be there and you could make it the home page, meaning it would set this home to old home.

[01:50] Excuse me. And routes the everyone for our schools that come to here.

[02:00] You need to do the same process for each of these solutions that would need to be moved out into none. Right. You don't have to do it for all of these because they're all in solutions.

[02:10] You'd be able to grab the whole thing. Same for how we help. But all the team about, et cetera, would all need to be moved out. OK, so those pieces are in place. Once you do that, there's the method sort of pass that needs to happen.

[02:20] This usually can't happen in Webflow. It's all disabled when it's inside of dev. So I kind of this is something I usually have going in web or in a figma is kind of a one to one for the images.

[02:30] And then I use their generate system at this point. It's pretty good for generating the actual SEO stuff.

[02:40] So on the behavior management page, for example, you can see that this page is this is currently the live one.

[02:50] This has some SEO stuff in it. So I have a meta tag, the title tag. Basically, this is the format that I've been using for most of your your stuff.

[03:00] It's kind of a typical one I use. And then for the actual meta description, I really hit generate and it will write something in there based on the content of the page.

[03:10] If you want to do something else, go for it. But that that typically works. The sitemap index or about that for now. Then there's the sort of open graph stuff.

[03:20] So this is some of the pieces that actually shows up as the pretty link and kind of makes it more of a rich link when you send people something.

[03:30] Otherwise, it would look like that right. Kind of boring or wouldn't even have this open graph piece. So literally be nothing. It would just be a URL. So to kind of build up the URL and people paste it, you can use the SEO title tag and you can use the description.

[03:40] And you can see there's this open graph image, which if you open up and search to open.

[03:50] Yeah. So behavior page image. So and then I'm adding that in now. I've obviously made that offline and uploaded it ahead of time to be able to do this.

[04:00] So I'll show you that later. Another video. But yeah. So each page would need to kind of have those things written and in place.

[04:10] OK. So then you have all your pages on the route. All the meta information is in there. Presumably you've done like link checks, that kind of thing. There are a couple of places in the nav which will need a manual link.

[04:20] So this is the old. If we're on the new one.

[04:30] So, for example, blog case study webinars, these will need a manual link to be added. I can leave that for you in slack of what that would be, but it basically will need the live URL and then to jump down to the right part of the page.

[04:40] So I will leave that for you. And then from there, it's time to actually do the launch.

[04:50] So that would be a couple of steps. So if I jump over to the site settings.

[05:00] And we go into publishing. Right now we have the site hosted at hello.augustschools.com. The goal is to change that to be augustschools.com, right? So I added this in here,

[05:10] which I think we did on one of our calls, just as like a quick demo. So it's still

[05:20] basically sitting there. It's obviously unverified because there's no DNS records or whatever, but it's ready. So when you're like, I'm ready to actually launch it, you would want to go into Cloudflare or wherever you're handling your DNS,

[05:30] and go to the same records where hello's subdomain is defined, right? Because hello is a CDAME,

[05:40] so likely you'll be copying or changing some of this stuff where you might already see it there, right? So what you'll need to do is add, let's see, there'll be a couple things. You'll need

[05:50] to modify. I'll just say modify because I don't know what your current DNS records look like. But basically, you probably have a www, and you probably already have an A record. It's an at

[06:00] pointing somewhere else, pointing to the headless CMS. So you'll need to add the text record. There may already be one there. Let me see if these are the same, actually. Oh, I can't open

[06:10] it. So yeah, it might already be there. It might just need a new one. So you update it to this.

[06:20] You could update the A record to be this IP address. And then if there's a C name for www, you would update it to be cdn.webflow.com. Once you do that, wait like 30 seconds or whatever,

[06:30] you come over here and you hit verify, and it will check your DNS records to see if that is accurate,

[06:40] and if it can find all the pieces there. And if it can, then you go up to publish, and you'll hit publish. And it obviously won't say hello, it'll say August schools. In the

[06:50] meantime, that will break this, right? Because you would want to remove the C name that's hello.

[07:00] Because otherwise, those won't be going anywhere anymore. Now, once you do that, you're going to want to add some redirects to the pages that currently exist to where the new

[07:10] location would be, whether you point them to the same page that started there just now at a different URL, or if you send them to the new like best place that they would find the content

[07:20] in the new website, which is sort of like what the long term redirect would be, right? You'd say like this is where the forms information used to be, but now it's part of forms and family portal. So

[07:30] you're going to end up here. But yeah, and so that would be basically the multi-step thing. It's a little bit cumbersome, undoubtedly. But once that's in place, then your primary domain

[07:40] becomes August schools. And from there, you can just kind of continue to publish. And we would also be out of this kind of working always in dev world, where adding a new page could happen and

[07:50] you could publish to just the staging site instead. And then you can kind of go check and see how you

[08:00] feel about it or whatever before kind of pushing it to production. But in the meantime, we're in between two worlds. So hopefully that isn't terribly confusing. And if you're like now,

[08:10] we're just going to wait for you to get back, then that'll work too. Talk soon.