Timing is everything

I just thought I’d share a funny experience from the weekend just gone.

We have been providing an Website update service to East Beechboro Primary school for the last 12 months or so. A month ago I put forward a proposal to give the old website a makeover, it was running an old version of Joomla and looked a tad dated. I created a test site and put in WordPress with a really nice theme that suited how their old site worked but provided a much more modern look as well as giving the school the ability to have a few blogs for their classes and a calendar for all the activities that were scheduled.

They loved the new site and gave the go ahead for the overhaul, which I scheduled in for last weekend to minimise the downtime.

So the weekend comes and I started work.

I backed up the old site, installed the shiny, new WordPress framework and imported the demo site data. All was going swimmingly and I had about half of the site completed when I started to get an error when I tried to open the new site. Thinking that was weird, I checked the backend control panel, which I could still access, as well as the FTP that was still working. It didn’t make a lot of sense as I still couldn’t access the actual website.

I continued on for a bit and then decided to escalate the problem to the web hosts the school were using. I logged a ticket explaining what was going on and expressed that it was fairly urgent as it needed to be up by Monday. An hour or two later I got an email back explaining that as my email address wasn’t on the list of contacts, I couldn’t log tickets for the site. I replied back emphasizing that it really needed to be resolved as the site was being updated and needed to be working by Monday and if they couldn’t help me then I would make sure the school knew who was holding things up. To their credit they didn’t just delete my email 🙂 .. They replied back saying they had a look and found ……

 

… the school’s domain name expired on that same day. Talk about bad timing, half way through the update and I was in the zone to finish it all off and present it to the school for Monday but it wasn’t to be.

I emailed the Principal on Saturday night explaining the problem and got a reply back Sunday morning saying he would take care of it on Monday.

Monday afternoon it was all back up and online so I finished the updates, knocked up some documentation on how to use the new blogs and calendar and handed over the keys to the new owners.

 

Ok, so maybe it’s not all that funny but it made me laugh over the weekend 🙂

 

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