Planning a website deployment

This topic describes the stages of website deployment and considerations to help improve the impact of your planning.  Episerver is a scalable platform that you can deploy in a wide range of deployment environments, on a single server, virtual machine, or large web farm network clusters.

There are many good approaches for development of a website, from classic to iterative. How you plan, build, design, integrate, test, and deliver your solutions relies on approaches to standardizing your process to make it easy to maintain your solutions and better leverage and create new solutions.

The following stages are a baseline for your Episerver deployment. Development usually takes place on a developer workstation and then deployed to a test server. After successful testing, the solution is deployed to a live production web server.

Prerequisite: See the system requirements for the Episerver platform, CMS, and Commerce.

• Plan

  You should coordinate your requirements, deployment architecture, systems integration needs, and infrastructure up front. Good planning and preparation saves a lot of time and effort over the life of a website. Before you deploy a website, consider the following questions:

  • What preparations do you need?
  • What technical aspects must be considered during development?
    • How should you build content?
    • How is the acceptance testing done?
  • Should you migrate content from an existing website, or create a new website from scratch?
  • What features do you want implemented on the website? (This affects development and configuration.)
  • How will you maintain and host the website: on-premises or using a cloud-based solution?
• Develop

  Primary development of your solution has a strong focus on requirements and iterative delivery, with frequent communication with your end users and customers. The more you communicate and show progress during this phase, the more solid your efforts and results will be as you move into integration and testing.

• Test

  After you complete core development, thoroughly test and verify your system, including the public-facing portion, business logic you have developed, the back-end systems, and all interfaces you have with third-party systems and controls. Also, test your solution in conjunction with the expected business processes and operational support teams that will be operating and managing the solution.

• Deploy

  Deploying an Episerver solution requires planning and timing to roll out your solution to a live or production environment to ensure your customer's experience is a good one. Your deployment may take different forms such as a cut-over from an existing system, or launch your new site from a new system.

• Maintain and enhance

  The final stage is ongoing maintenance, enhancements, and improvements that are part of growing and supporting your Episerver solution.

Related topics

• Deploying Episerver CMS sites
• Deployment scenarios