In a new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell has written a beginner's guide to deployment for web based applications in response to a recent email from a reader.

I [replied to the email] with some suggestions (and my consulting rate) attached, and we had a little email exchange about some improvements that could fit in with the existing setup, both of the hardware and of the team skills. Then I started to think ... he probably isn't the only person who is wondering if there's a better way. So here's my advice, now with pictures!

She's broken it up into a few different sections to make it a bit more easily digestible:

• A "starting point" where there's a development, staging and live environments
• Using source control to manage code
• Branching for effective coordination
• Integration of automated deployment

She also mentions other "bonus points" like making a build server, documentation generation and Javascript/CSS minification.