Go Live: Making your site available to the public and moving it to a custom domain

Going Live

 

Webform Set-up
Your site comes preloaded with 2 webforms, contact and sponsorship. You will need to edit these to suit your needs and reflect your group. You will also need to configure them to send to the appropriate person/people. Have a look at this playlist for instructions. While you are thinking about webforms, there may be other opportunities for you to create webforms that will gather information that will be useful to you or your audience. Audition forms, booking forms, and newsletter signup are just a few examples. Have a look at the tutorials we have available on this subject.

 

Spam Protection
You can optionally sign up for Google Re-captcha, if you wish to enable comment spam protection on your site. 

 

Site stats (advanced and optional)
We strongly recommend that you analyze your site visitor traffic statistics. In order to accomplish this we will need to connect your Google Analytics code to your site. As such, you will need to sign up for Google Analytics  and then paste the UA- code into the “Google analytics” page available in the “public site area” of the menu. Once this is completed, you will be able to analyze your site statistics on your Google Analytics page.

 

Site Review (optional)
When you feel like you have accomplished your goals for your site and think you are ready to go live then it is time to do an inventory:

  1. [  ] Did you paste in all content using the paste function outlined in the getting started video?

  2. [  ] Did you configure your webforms to send to someone?

  3. [  ] Are all of the pages in your menu filled with content (please disable empty pages)

  4. [  ] Has someone proofed your site for spelling and grammatical errors?

  5. [  ] Does your site provide a way for people to contact you on the front page?

  6. [  ] If a visitor were to go to your site, would they know from the front page what type of music you sing, and where you are located?

  7. [  ] If a visitor were to visit your site because they are looking for a place to sing, would your site answer their questions about personality, expectations, how to audition, where to learn more, what other members enjoy most about your group, and what your group priorities (passions) are?

  8. [  ] What about those looking to support you financially, by hiring you, as a volunteer, or by attending your shows? Do you answer their questions?

  9. [  ] Perhaps most importantly, does your personality shine through? Will your visitors “get you”?

 

Email
Choir Genius provides email forwarding in the Email section of your members only site.When your site goes live, the url of your site is going to change - and so will the email addresses associated with those mailing lists. If your URL is "yourchorus.com", then all of your email addresses will end in "@yourchours.com".

if you're currently using domain email, please read this article. If you decide to continue using your domain email, do not change your mx records in the steps listed below.

 


 

Porting your site (please complete during regular business hours)
Contact your DNS host OR log in to your DNS Control Panel

Please change your domain settings so that it is using the following nameservers:

  • nile.ns.cloudflare.com
  • tia.ns.cloudflare.com

Allow up to 24 hours for this change to be processed. There will be no downtime when you switch your name servers. Traffic will gracefully roll from your old name servers to the new name servers without interruption. Your site will remain available throughout the switch.

Contact us to let us know that you have completed these steps - we will need to add records on our side and wait for the change to propagate. Once it does, we will transfer your site.

 


Your site is live!
Very soon your site will appear online. If your site does not appear within 24 hours then there is probably an issue. Double check your DNS settings. Email us so that we are aware and can check on the server side as well.