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Nicole
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« on: July 26, 2007, 07:56:37 AM » |
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I had a call yesterday morning from a lady who wanted help making changes to her website. She had a website that she told me was created in China and used Dreamweaver, she had FrontPage and therefore didn’t think she had the ability to update the site.
I spent probably half an hour on the phone to her yesterday explaining that it largely didn’t matter, and showed her how to “view source”, cut and paste in notepad and then paste that code into FrontPage.
The interesting thing was though, that she had a “quote of the day” feature on her index page and her index page was a .php page whereas the remainder of the pages in her site were all .htm. I therefore assumed that this was a php script calling the new quote each day. She wasn’t that confident with what I’d told her so we made arrangements for her to come over today which she did.
Before she arrived I took a good look at her site, terribly coded and so I figured that while she was here I’d show her how to upload pages to her site but I’d also do a sales pitch about redesigning her site. I was also curious about this index page so I suggested to her that she bring with her, her hosting username and password so I could look in her control panel which I did.
When she arrived, she brought with her an email from the original website designer sent following my client’s last attempt to update her website, the email clearly said not to touch the index.php file, but all changes to the opening page should be made by accessing the index.htm page located in a folder called “templates”.
I located this file and so the first thing I showed her today was how to correct a very simple spelling mistake using the cPanel file manager. We made the very minor change while in design view in cPanel and pressed “save”.
We then went to her website to see the simple change and her opening page had mysteriously lost all of it’s styles and images. After a little bit of troubleshooting I discovered that the code view in cPanel for this page was showing the “less than” sign as & l t ; instead of the <, I couldn’t understand how that could happen, so I changed them back to the < sign and hit preview – there was no change. I went back to the code view and noticed all the < signs that I’d just changed had changed back to their entity code.
In the twinkling of an eye I knew my credibility had dropped dramatically, I felt all sweaty and just didn’t understand how this could happen so then I began a barrage of emails and phone calls to her web host.
After 3 hours her web host agreed to restore her site to how it was yesterday and my client, who I must say was the most pleasant and understanding client I’ve dealt with in a long time, left willing to pay me for 3 hours of my time but with me only charging her for an hour and a half.
Something so simple had turned into a monstrosity, but I’m glad at least that she was sitting next to me the whole time and witnessed the simple change we had attempted to make.
In the midst of waiting for phone and email responses from her host, I started on my sales pitch, which as we all know is hard enough in the first place trying to explain about poor websites, poor coding, web standards and accessibility and better SE rankings as a result of better coding to an extreme novice. Subsequently I fumbled through it and somehow she seemed to be willing to listen and “might” take me up on the offer. My parting lines though were to the effect that “you get what you pay for”, meaning that if you get a FREE website design as part of a package including hosting, domain registration etc, amongst a lot of other things sold to her at a marketing sales seminar, they send your site to be designed in China (no disrespect really), then don’t expect too much.
I’m probably writing this more out of relief that she, as nice as she was, has gone and I can compose myself with a glass of wine and a cigarette, but also because I have learnt something. . .
. . . be VERY wary about helping people with existing websites. Be VERY wary about making any changes, no matter how minor they are (as experienced) to another designer’s work, and ALWAYS (in future I will), have the client sign something to say that they have approached you for the following help and give you permission to make changes that they agree to while in your presence, and that you take no responsibility should anything beyond your control go wrong with their website.
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