1.​ Overview

This article outlines the rcommended, staged approach for launching your virtual experience. We’ve broken the journey down into clear phases to ensure a smooth, successful rollout to your students.

While we recommend following these steps, the journey is flexible. Some customers, typically those with a smaller audience or a tighter timeline, may choose to skip some stages and proceed directly to Public Launch.

This article is a response to a previous document entitled “When is Vepple Live?”

​2.​ The Five Stages of Launch

Stage 1 - In Development

Your team is actively working to populate the CMS with content for your virtual experience, with technical support from the Vepple Team. Your CMS is “live”, meaning any changes you make will immediately affect what is seen in your Vepple (which is fine, as your Vepple is not publicly accessible).

Stage 2 - User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

• You have finished populating your CMS to a standard that you are happy with.

• The Vepple Team has disabled your access to the live CMS and given you access to your staging environment, where all updates will be made moving forward.

• Your team conducts final content validation checks (appropriate tagging, WCAG compliance etc.) and gathers internal feedback from key content staff (e.g. subject matter experts about academia ) to ensure factual accuracy and make sure that content has the appropriate sign off from all stakeholders, before it's published and available to the public.

• Technically,, your platform is ready to go live to the public.

Stage 3 - Private Beta

You share the link with a small, trusted group (e.g., select staff or students) to test functionality, user experience, navigation and gather initial feedback without public traffic. In some cases, you may even set up focus groups with students to give you feedback on the virtual experience.

Stage 4 - Soft Launch

You begin targeted promotion and might even add a few Vepple links to non-key pages of your university website and/or the link is used in select marketing comms for example a single offer holder email. The experience starts receiving live student traffic.

Stage 5 - General Availability (GA)

You place public links on key university pages (e.g., the university homepage or main recruitment pages) and use the link in all relevant marketing campaigns. You are now using Vepple to its fullest and we will support you to drive maximum value from the platform.