Importance of a staging environment

During the recent conversion to my new servers, I worked on upgrading my site without the benefit of a staging environment.  I strongly recommend never doing this in real life, especially if a site gets significant traffic (unlike our own, for example).  SEOColumbus.com is a Wordpress powered site, as some of you may have guessed, and for those that don’t use Wordpress, the latest release (v 2.5.1) is a bit sensitive, to say the least. 

In part of my effort to get the site converted quickly, we discovered a few new conflicts that arise with multiple javascript errors.  Combining Google Analytics, which I also use somewhat religiously for this site, with other WP plugins has a tendency to make some interesting and difficult to debug errors when combined together in this new Wordpress release.  I *think* I have everything working in harmony right now, as I discovered a few lines of code out there that needed a little tweaking.  If any of you come across something less than perfect on this site in the near future, please drop me a note and let me know so that we can get it fixed ASAP.  I typically don’t let any of our subcontractors touch the site except in case of emergency - and if the site is broken like it was today, it is fair game for anyone of us to jump in and get it fixed.  Hats off to my main man, Manny, for finding the javascript conflict code fix today.  However, because of this code fixing issue, Google wasn’t able to access our posting about the case study we are doing, and therefore could not index the site.  Let’s just pretend that the post was submitted tonight, since none of you (nor Google themselves) were able to see it until tonight anyway.  ;)