Here's a little tip you might find useful if you work in a similar way to me. I know I find it's a life-saver from time to time.

With a few of my customers I use the same kind of environment for development, testing and deployment of applications. At my end there's my development server which has the template/development copy of an application on it. At their end is both a test/UA version and the live version of the application (often, but not always, on the same server but different directories).

The trouble with working with three versions of the application is that they all look the same and you really needs to have your wits about you if you're to avoid making the mistake of testing in the live version. Often the only clue as to which is which is the occurrence of "test" data on the screen and the difference in URLs. It's easy to forget which is which and do something you shouldn't. To exacerbate the problem I often use my own local DNS to setup near-identical URLs that look like www.company2.co.uk/apps/app.nsf. The only difference from the live version being the occurrence of the 2 and it's easy to miss that.

To get round this I've been using a technique whereby I plaster some in-yer-face text over the application's "logo", which lets me know what I'm looking at merely by a quick glance at the screen.

For the sake of example, let's say I have development, test and live copies of the codestore website/database. Here's what the headers for each would look like:

Obviously, you guys, as readers, would only ever see the top version and be non-the-wiser about the others.

To go about this you first need an application to which it can apply. By this I mean that your application (like most?) will comprise of a header area in which there's a "logo" image in the top left. It's this image that you're going to change. In changing it we assume that it will very rarely (if ever) actually change in itself, which I think is a fare assumption.

Once you have your three (still works for two though -- i.e. development and live) versions in place, open up the logo image in a graphics package and write over it in big red letters to let you know which is which. Save these new versions of the logo (name them according to which version they apply e.g: "logo-dev.gif"). You don't need to be a graphics whizz to do this!

Now open all of the sites in Designer mode (even the live one) and disable design updates to the logo image, like so:

Now refresh the logo's Image Resources in each version of the database with the right version of the logo you just created.

And there you have it! An easy way to tell one from the other. Like I say, a life-saver at times.