Simple Lesson of the week for better marketing

This is a very embarrassing blog to write.  Twice this month my website went down and my phone number quit working.

Ah Technology.....

Now we all have things happen where a website might not work, or a phone number goes out of service for a little while and we fix it and move on.  These were both internal technology oversights, and that is why they are embarrassing.

In order to help us troubleshoot a website, I gave a vendor access to our servers.  Not knowing that we hosted more than 100 websites on that server alone, they uploaded a file to the main folder.  All of the websites quit working and no body knew it.

Thankfully, I pay for a monitoring service that randomly checks all of our sites for errors each day.  I get an email right to my phone when the site is found to be down.  I don't know how many customers found our website down and got a 404 page not found error or a 500 server error.  It really doesn't matter if it was one.  That one could have been our next big client.

The phones were another issue all together.  We buy banks of phone numbers to track add campaigns.  Our main number is in one of those blocks of numbers.  Unlike a regular phone number we "buy" these blocks each year.  This year, for whatever reason, one block didn't get paid for and our number was in that block.

I am glad to say it was only the block of numbers for our company, and no customers lost a call, but again how many calls did we lose?  Fortunately some vendors had my home number and called me to make sure I was OK.  That is the value of a good vendor relationship.  I never call my office, so it could have been weeks before I knew.  You can't fix that kind of damage easily.

More recently, a client had a Trojan horse infect his website.  He wasn't a hosting client, so we had nothing to do with the website at the time.  The hosting vendor blamed the long delay in removing the Trojan horse on several factors.  They are now a hosting client.

Just today I met with a company and 90% of the pictures on the website weren't correctly addressed so the site looked like a sixth grader built it for a class project and forgot the camera.  Seeing it would have made me bounce off the walls.  When I called the office to tell them, no body could find the "computer person".

After doing a little checking it was clear their website was like that for months.  So a couple of quick tips.  Have everyone call your numbers regularly so you know they work, and either pull up your website every day or pay for a service to make sure it works.  Keep in mind many browsers just show you the "cached" web page until you reload or navigate around, so just making your website you home page might not alert you to a problem.