How do you revamp a website for the client?

Community
1

Hello everyone,

how do you work with clients who have already their website and they need to have it visible until their new website (created by you is done)? Do you create it via localhost and upload it later? In this case how you communicate changes to the client who is not nearby? Or you develop it within your own site and then you upload it?

I had some hiccups with a transferring manually a new site from one domain to another (nervous issues with permalinks and languages). And BackupBuddy did not work (I still have to take a contact with them to see why it happened).

I appreciate your advice and personal experience.

2

I develop my sites locally (I have XAMPP installed), then when they are ready for the client to view and check the funtionality, I upload them to my server behind my portfolio site. I don’t transfer the site to their server until it is ready to go live, and I have received my final payment. There is little if any downtime for their site, but just in case, I do the transfer at a time during the day when they are not likely to have much traffic.

3

I do the same as WebMachine and build on XAMPP, create a folder on my server and upload a demo there along with setting up a database if required. When the customer is happy I upload to their site.

4

More or less it is the same process. It also depends if I’m handling the hosting or not. Then when the site is ready, they can look the final result in the new hosting (using the IP address instead of the www name) and, if everything is OK, I only have to change the DNS servers or transfer the domain.

5

Basically the same here, I have development server which I upload the site to so the client can see it working, and of course I can test it in a “live” situation.

6

Thank you, molona. What is better: to advice client to pick up himself the independant hosting or host client at your hoster? I always push clients to buy their own hosting plan and provide me with admin details, I dont resell.

7

I guess it’s the standard and good practice. I had big problems with permalinks after the transfer, part of the functioned perfectly in one language, but not in other two languages. How do you handle this?

8

Since you don’t resell, in your case it is easy… they have to look for a hosting somewhere else.

I do resell but I don’t force them to use my hosting service. Reselling has two advantages:

  1. you can increase your profit (even if marginally, lots of small amouts add up to a large amount)
  2. you will know the environment and therefore it will be easier to know what you can or can’t do in terms of programming
9

That really depends on the kind of error you’re getting. Most shared hosting allow more or less the same stuff and put the same limits so if it works in your own hosting, it should more or less work in theirs.

The only thing that you can do is investigate why those permalinks fail and in order to do so you should start with the server logs