Confusing Your Pilot / Beta Users Before Full Site Migration

Your visitor winds up at a piloted section of your site, but the first link they click on goes right back to the old site. That would be a bit like playing a maze game where you suddenly roll into a hole and aren't playing in the game any more (but didn't know the rules or that you were playing a game). How do you deal with that and other linking issues when piloting a site? (Also see background on what/why to conduct pilots before full site migrations or all articles on pilots)

Web Site Visitor Confusion

What are some of the ways that pilot can be confusing for your site visitors? Here are some problems and suggestions for improvement:

Not Knowing Where the Pilot Begins and Ends

One of the keys to deciding what to pilot is choosing whether the site visitors will clearly understand where the pilot starts and ends. So before talking about any technical or implementation details, the selection should just make sense. For instance, if you have a clothing site then a possible piloted site would be the women's clothing store. This might make good sense to your set of users. Note that one of the reasons that you might be undertaking a new site is to consolidate different systems, so you may be piloting a new site that contains content from multiple sites. See the example diagram below, where some content from two subsites is being piloted in one site. Using the clothing example again, this could be where there are currently two separate sites that include all of your clothing, and you are eventually merging to one. You could pilot a women's site that will include content from both of the existing sites. At any rate, the key is that, even before considering the technical implementations, the site user should understand what is piloted and what is part of the old site.

Not Knowing When Leaving the Pilot Site

In addition, there are some ways you can implement the system to make it more obvious for the user whether they are on the piloted or existing site, including:

• Indicating when leaving the piloted site. You may wish to implement a standard intermediate page that the user sees before leaving your piloted site (see #3 in the diagram below). At least that way the user has the opportunity to back up if they want to stay on the piloted site.
• Clearly branding the piloted site. You also want to make sure that visually the piloted site is quite different from the existing site.

To Beta or In-Place Pilot

One question will be whether to just plain replace an existing subsite or to do a Beta that users can optionally try out. One advantage of a Beta is that you can have one entry point (the Beta home page) where you can explain to your users what the Beta is, including what the advantages of the new site will be (see #1 in the diagram below). If launching a subsite in place, then you also need to be ready for deep linking to your site. This can also be an advantage so you can do a live pilot of your rewriting rules, but a disadvantage is not being able to explain the new site as easily.

Unnecessary Linking to "Old" Site

If you blindly cut and paste content, you'll have a whole lot of links going straight back to your old site (like the ball dropping in the whole in the game above). This is because you probably will have hard links to your old site within the content. Some links will need to point to the existing site and others to the new site, depending on if the target content is moved into the pilot as well. If you are doing an in-place pilot instead of a Beta, then the old links should continue to work but you still may prefer to get the links "right" anyway (for example, if you want to use managed links that some CMSes offer).

As an example of unnecessary linking, let's say you have two pages B and C that will be piloted. If you just move the content without changing the links, you'll wind up on the old site when click from page B on the new site. Obviously you want to make sure to link from the piloted B page to the piloted C page (see #2 in the diagram below).

Example Linkages in a Pilot, when using a Beta