A few years ago a client came to me. I won’t mention his name, but will tell you a little bit about the project. He is an artist and wanted a site to display his works. Great, I could use WordPress and one of the many gallery plugins. BUT, he had very specific needs. He really wanted to have the images speak for themselves, and didn’t want any of the normal features of most galleries (and the things most people ask for). For instance he didn’t like light-box effects. He didn’t even want any borders around his images. Make a long story short, we built him a custom theme and fulfilled all of his needs.
Problem: We really had to re-write a lot of the gallery plugin. So we really couldn’t upgrade the plugin or we’d lose all the customizations. This wasn’t an issue for a couple of years. But then changes to the WordPress core messed up the file upload. We could no longer upload 40-50 files at a time which is the main functionality we needed. Adding images one at a time wasn’t an option. So what do I do? Should I bill him for 8 additional hours to bring his site up to date? (his maintenance plan included 2 hours and the project would take 10.)
Solution: Sometimes you just have to suck it up. I didn’t want to bill the guy $1,000 dollars, and not sure that he could afford it. So, I did the work myself which required me to set up a staging area, update the plug-in and then go through the process of again customizing the functionality and CSS. Fortunately, now the plug-in is improved to the point where my customizations would be stored in a separate area that would allow me to always upgrade the plug-in as needed. So the client would be much better off for years to come.
Bottom Line: I won’t get back the 10+ hours, or make any money for my troubles. But I know I did the right thing, and karma is definitely on my side. Going the extra mile has to be your normal behavior if you are managing websites if you are to stand out in the crowd. I believe we do.
Because there are some treacherous roads you need to cross. Namely, plug-ins and WordPress updates. When you log into your WordPress dashboard you’re typically greeted with what plugins need to be updated and if there is a core WordPress update. Because they’re basically automatic updates you go ahead and do them. 9 out of 10 times this works fine. The 10th time however you blow away your website entirely or screw up functionality or display.
Here are 3 cases that illustrate my point:
Case number one:
I had a simple WordPress point release. I had done this update to 20 other sites. But on this one site I clicked update and all of a sudden the screen went white. Nothing, zero, zilch, ugatz. Site was gone. Fortunately, I back up my sites on a regular basis, and in this case had just taken a full backup. Getting it back was not as easy as you might think even with backup plugin. Restore failed. I was forced to FTP the backup files to the site. Luckily this took care of it and the client site was only down for a matter of minutes. But, imagine Joe client who doesn’t have the skill set nor the ability to get their site back, their business literally could be crippled for days.
Case number two:
I had a notification that an e-commerce client had an update to their UPS plug-in. Seemed like a very simple update, according to the documentation. I made the update, to the site did some testing. It seemed to be okay. But, I was wrong. When you added something to your cart, you got a PHP fatal error. Again, luckily I had just taken a backup and could restore the plug-in to the prior version. If not, a business which relies almost 100% on their website would have been down. While I am not a genius, I do know how to backup properly and I do know how to restore. And if push came to shove I had the whole site backed up on my server daily. So I could’ve gotten the client back up and running relatively quickly.
Case number three:
I have a client which uses a web calendar. The plug-in update came and again seem pretty minor. Well, this update actually disabled the backend. You could not get to the dashboard! And now luckily, again I knew what to do and once I disabled the plugin I could go back and grab the backup and again restore the old version. If not, the client would have been out of luck.
Bottom line:
Managing a WordPress site is not as easy as they make it sound. There is a lot of things you need to know in order to keep it running smooth 24/7/365. So make sure you have someone on your side helping you manage your website. That doesn’t mean you can’t do certain tasks yourself and save money. But you need someone in your corner to help you, especially in those times when you have problems. Not to say that that experts don’t have problems as well, we do. But part of being an expert is knowing how to solve those problems which at times can seem insurmountable. If you need help with your website management, please contact us at RooSites. We are happy to help.
