Is your website still live?
The other day I was getting ready to send some marketing information to a potential client. Included was a link to my other website (www.stenbergwrites.com). Since I use this site primarily as an online portfolio for potential writing and marketing clients, it doesn’t change often. Weeks may go by between times I visit this site.
Before sending the link to the potential client, I decided to check my site to see if I needed to make any updates. Imagine my shock when the site was off-line. I tried to log into the administration and was frozen out of there too. In a panic I called my web hosting company to see what was going on.
It turns out that they had upgraded their servers and the theme for my other site wasn’t compatible with their upgrade. Since the Baby Boomer Entrepreneur site continued working after the upgrade it never occurred to me to check on the www.stenbergwrites.com site. The tech guy did something on his end to get the site back up and gave me instructions on how to upgrade my theme to make it compatible with the new technology.
I learned a valuable lesson. It only took an hour to fix the problem but my site was down for a couple of days before I discovered the problem. How much business did I lose in those two days? There’s no way to tell. I don’t know who tried to check me out online and went on to someone else when they discovered my site was down.
Note to self: check all my domain names on a regular basis just to make sure they’re still working properly.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Posted
on
Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 11:42 am under
I’m glad you mentionned this Andrea; the same thing happened to me and it was a good lesson. After it got all fixed, I looked at the site stats and wondered who saw my site in its sorry state. It’s the kind of thing that gives the impression that we’re running a “small potato” enterprise.
Checking sites periodically should be a regular activity, just like backing up (though obviously not as frequent). And we all backup regularly don’t we? (Oops).
June 21st, 2008 at 6:41 pmHelene,
You are so right. I’ve got backups scheduled into my electronic planner - and I almost always do them when they’re scheduled. My next step it to make it automated so I don’t have to rely on my memory.
Andrea
June 23rd, 2008 at 4:15 pm