For something to go live on your website either means a developer has to write code that knows to do something at a certain time, or they need to be on hand to set it live. If you’re asking for something to go live on a holiday or in the middle of the night, this may mean an increased hourly rate. Therefore, ask yourself if you really need it live then or if it could go live during office hours.

I had a client contact me yesterday asking for new branding to go live on their website on the 1st January.

Now, I don’t know about you, but our agency is closed on the 1st January, as it’s a bank holiday in the UK. So the client had 3 options:

1) We write loads of code that says “if the time is before midnight on New Years Eve, show this branding – but if it’s after midnight on New Years Eve of this particular year, show this branding”. And with branding – and a logo in the header, in the footer, as a watermark place holder, in all the different emails the site sends out – that would be a lot of code in a lot of places.

And then to keep things tidy, you might want to go back and remove it all in January. So that’s gonna make the job more expensive.

2) This client could pay someone to work New Years Eve so that they set the changes live at midnight, rather than ring in the New Year. But you’re gonna need to pay a higher rate if someone is working a holiday, or in the middle of the night.

We have done that a few times though – one of our Senior Devs was happy to work a couple of New Year Eve’s in a row when a membership client raised their prices in the New Year a couple of times 2 years running.

But he actually did the work in advance and then just clocked in at midnight to do a test transaction to ensure the checks looking at the time and date before charging the right price were kicking in. Because you wouldn’t normally make an important change and not check it for real on the live site, but that’s effectively what you’d be doing in option 1!

3) Option 3 – and this is what this client went for and I really knew they would – was just to put it live on the 2nd Jan.

There was no big reason for it to be New Years Day, so it wasn’t worth paying more for.

So just before you plan a launch for midnight, or a weekend, or a specific date without checking if it’s a bank holiday, have a chat with your developer.

Some things are easily automated. Lots of CMSs give you the option to schedule a page to go live or be retired at a certain time – an update on an existing page is trickier, unless you can expire the old page, set live an almost identical one (with the changes), and keep the URL the same so no links break.

The main point is, if you’re working with developers who can code, anything is possible – but it’s just a question of whether it’s worth the effort (as in, expense) for your business.