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Today on Oprah: O3 Launches Site for Caron Treatment Centers

When it rains, it pours. After several months of strategizing, planning, designing, developing and populating, we were coming to the finish line for launching the first of five websites for Caron Treatment Centers, one of the nation’s largest drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers. Generally, it takes a village to launch a site… especially one this big. There are last minute content edits, bug fixes, server migrations and a slew of other items that make it to page 20 on our prelaunch checklist. The whole process generally takes a few days and requires a company-wide effort.

Then Oprah steps in, and things get crazy.

We were told the day before our scheduled launch date, that one of Caron’s faithful alumni was going to be on Oprah the next day talking about her experience. At 4pm. Right in the middle of launch. Awesome. Thanks O.

Because it can take up to 24 hours for a site’s DNS to propagate worldwide, we were left with one option… launch a day early. In fact, it was critical that we launched within an hour of getting the news. While this wouldn’t have been such a huge deal, this particular situation had a ton of moving parts we needed to consider.

First of all, their existing CMS platform had been built in such a way that all of Caron’s sites were tied into the primary domain. Which meant that when we flipped the switch on the primary domain, the four satellite sites would crash. While we knew this going into launch, and had planned around it, there were several things we needed to check and account for… for all four sites. Which meant hours of QA time. But with some quick thinking, and some black-magic server trickery, we managed to avoid any issues entirely by tricking the server into seeing the old domain… so it essentially didn’t know the rest of the world was looking at a new site. Valuable lesson here: when architecting a site, consider the long term business implications of having to move it. You want website services to be as modular as possible. Fault tolerance is a big deal when you start tying together so many sites and services. With proper planning up front, you can ensure the ability to move sites, servers, change service providers, 3rd party add-on services, all without re-engineering the sites or platform they are on.

Then there were the SEO and SEM implications. While all of our sites are extremely SEO friendly, and we had already planned around Caron’s existing campaigns, we had to put our development team into overdrive to make sure all targeted pages were in place and all page redirects were accounted for. There are over 300 links on the new Caron site. That’s a lot of pages to check. But with the help of our dynamic and responsive SEO / SEM partner, we managed to check all pages and confirm proper tracking within an hour of launch.

Finally, there was the expected spike in traffic we had to account for… because when Oprah speaks, people listen. But again, our savvy tech department, knowing Caron experiences media blitzes like this on an ongoing bases, had already built a server environment with the capacity to expand and contract within a moment’s notice… and without costing our client an arm and a leg for one day of traffic.

The result was a virtually flawless launch, and a beautiful new website. While it’s not common practice to push a site live so quickly, it would have been a hugely missed PR opportunity for our client. But because of proper planning and expertise, we were able to deliver a full 24 hours ahead of schedule… and Oprah was psyched.