Gondola New Website Process

Understand the process of getting your new Gondola site created using your existing website.

Vitaliy Levit avatar
Written by Vitaliy Levit
Updated over a week ago

Overview

The process of getting a new Gondola website, by migrating your existing one, is summarized in three high-level steps:

  1. Generation & Migration

  2. Iteration

  3. Go-live

This article will summarize what is happening in each of these steps, as well as details and instructions for anything you'll need to do.

Generation & Migration

In the generation & migration process, we’re primarily focused on getting the starting point of your website up and running, and in a good position to send you for feedback.

This part of our process involves lots of back-and-forth copy/pasting imagery and copy from your existing website into relevant fields for your Gondola website. We may also reach out to you to send us your imagery directly, to ensure there isn’t any quality loss from downloading & re-uploading them directly from your website.

This phase can take anywhere from 1 day to a week, depending on our existing client load, and the complexity and requirements of your website. A website with 10+ products will take significantly longer to migrate than one with 3 products.

Following the creation of your new website draft, we’ll send it to you and we enter into the second phase: iteration.

Iteration

This is the longest phase of the process and will require the most time from you.

Although we do most of the heavy lifting and will be the ones making the updates to your site, we’ll still need you to take a look at it and let us know what needs to be changed to fully reflect your business and get it to a state that you’re happy with.

In this phase, we’ll be sending you emails whenever it’s time for you to take a look at the site and leave us feedback on changes to make. The way that you will do that is through a visual feedback tool. This tool that you will use to see the current state of your website and make comments for feedback and changes can be accessed through the Gondola platform.

You can access the platform login page at this link: https://app.gondola.travel/authentication/login

Once in the platform, you can access the visual feedback interface by clicking the “Review website text, layout, and design” button or by visiting this link: https://app.gondola.travel/dashboard/overview/review

Once in the tool, you will see the current state of your website with an overlay that allows you to navigate within the site as well as make comments.

To leave comments, simply click where your comment applies to. This will open up a small window with the ability add copy for a copy change, leave feedback or ask a question, or give us a substitute image for a component.

Text Changes

To make a text change, click the text you’d like to update, and then click the “Suggest text changes”.

This will allow you to see a view of the copy on the site, and give us the exact change you’re looking to make.

Click save to save the changes.

Feedback or Questions

To make a general comment or ask a question related to a component, you can click the component your comment is about, and type it in. Simply hit “Post comment” afterward to save the comment.

Image Updates

To make an update to the image that the site is utilizing, or to attach an image to your comment, click the image or component your new upload applies to, and then click the “paperclip” icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the little window.

Then, simply select the image file from your device to attach is to the comment before you save the comment.

Viewing Other Pages

In order to see the other pages within your site, you’ll need to update the bottom toggle to “browse”.

By default, your clicks open the commenting modal. To switch between “browsing” and “commenting”, use the toggle at the bottom of the design feedback tool.

Then, once you’re ready to make comments again, click it again to set the toggle back to “Comment”.

Change Submission Process

⚠️ Please keep as much website-specific communication within the design tool. This allows us to more easily track change requests and understand, with specificity, what you are looking to change. Requests to support@gondola.travel will be slower to receive responses and slower to resolve the change given their non-specific nature.

Every time you submit a comment, our team receives a notification. Our team then applies the changes that you've requested.

Once we’ve address your comments, you'll receive a notification from Pastel, the tool we use, that a comment has either been resolved or has questions from us.

All requested changes and conversations are tracked in the 'Comments' left sidebar. Simply click on Comments in the bottom left corner to bring up the status of each requested change.

In order to view the status and discussion for each change, click on the comment itself or pull down the status dropdown.

We will go through up to 3 rounds addressing batches of your feedback before the site is ready to go live and be published on your real website domain.

Website Go-Live

When your website is ready to get visitors and showcase your business we’ll then be looking to publish it with your “real” business domain. This will require updating your domain name settings in the registrar you use to manage your domain (GoDaddy, Namecheap, name.com, etc.).

There are two options for publishing your website:

  1. Following our guide and updating the DNS yourself

  2. Providing your registrar login credentials to Gondola to update your DNS for you

Update my Domain Name Settings

Instructions for how to make this update yourself are at the following link. After you’ve successfully saved the changes on your DNS, make sure to notify Gondola of such to run through checks to ensure proper configuration, as well as to perform a post go-live checklist for your new website.

Instructions Link - make sure to click the “Configure Myself” tab.

Have Gondola Update Your DNS

To have Gondola make these domain name settings updates on your behalf, you’ll have to give us your login information so that we can log in on your behalf. Add your details in the Gondola platform at the link here.

After you’ve submitted your credentials, that will give us the details we need to log into your domain registrar and publish your website to your real domain. Most registrars have two-factor authentication, which will mean we’ll need a verification code from you when we try to log in. This verification code may be sent to your email or your phone number in a text, depending on which you utilized when you set up your account. We may call your cell during this process to retrigger the verification process to go live.

After Go-Live

After we’ve gone live with your website, we’ll perform a series of post go-live activities, and send you an email with next steps and a satisfaction survey.

You can continue to make updates to your site after you’ve gone live, both directly through the platform as well as through the same design feedback tool that you utilize in the onboarding process.

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