Last night was the relaunch of PeopleSoft.com. We fully integrated the content from the J.D. Edwards.com site with PeopleSoft.com for the USA/Corporate site (we get to do 21 international sites in March). This was my third major site launch on the team, and it was the smoothest and least stressful of all of them. I'm trying to figure out why.
First, our scope was smaller. We didn't move the ENTIRE site to a new content management system like we did in 2001. Or launch 21 brand new international sites like in 2002. We redid the products section and did some tweaks to other areas, and that was pretty much it. Global navigation, search, and our new product database all fell within my domain, and they were pretty easy to do. We still have old pages showing up in search results, but I know what we need to do to fix it, and it should be a relatively easy fix.
The thing that feels good about this launch is the site feels much more tidy. We fixed a lot of little things in our QA - random breadcrumb links (yes, our breadcrumbs are still handcoded - and I don't want to talk about it), links to learn more items, corrected banner style on many pages. We still have some things that are off, but we are in much better shape than after past launches.
Good job team!
