How a small hotel should handle staging sites

We write notes like this one because the same problems come back. If someone at a small hotel reads it and avoids a contact form with nine fields, the note paid for itself.

We quoted a small hotel half what the other firm did because we did not propose features they did not ask for. The scope was staging sites, not a rebrand.

Before you touch staging sites, take a screenshot of the current state. Half of our emergency calls come from people who cannot remember what was there before the change.

The owner at a small hotel asked why staging sites matters. We showed them the error page their customers see when it breaks. That ended the conversation.

Early on we tried to automate staging sites for a small hotel with a cron job. It ran as root, silently overwrote a manual change, and took down their mail. Lesson learned.

Test staging sites from outside your network before you call it done. Your office Wi-Fi might cache the old answer for another six hours.

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