Gail at BusinessKeeping provides services for operations management for small and medium size businesses.

Today I’m highlighting some recent work completed for a site overhaul, what went wrong during the process, and how it was fixed.

Gail first started working with us for ongoing, general Maintenance, and backup, several years ago, which is part of our core offerings, maintenance checked by a real person for your WordPress site.

She was struggling was a recent Hack that had injected, by ways of whited out text, links to spam websites. Nefarious, annoying, and not entirely new in method for website type hacks. We reached out to her to clean the hack, and offer site “hardening” a term that basically means, to add a few advised methods for making a WordPress website harder to hack. As I’m fond of saying, websites are like computers today, they need maintenance, protection, and backup, that much is clear.

After the cleanup, restoration, and a few communications, Gail mentioned wanting to update the look of her site and re-launch. It’s from this request we realized together that the navigation on her website had gone missing. It was undetermined when that happened, or exactly how, but it was critical to restoring. This was went wrong, IT Arsenal should have noticed something like this was not user initiated and reached out sooner, but things like this happen, and it was time to clean it up.

Luckily, since we had a long working relationship together, we’d been backing up Gail’s site for long enough to recover the navigation items, pages, content quickly. I love when the power of a working relationship and trust shows through. It was in this breakdown that Gail and I talked, for the first time in a long while, and only in being gracious, honest, and straightforward, did we both move forward quickly, I’d like to thank Gail for that!

Once the site was once again restored, it was time to go to work on a new iteration.

A new theme, Divi, was selected, and after a few weeks worth of update and tweak communications, a new site was produced in a development location, meaning not the live site just yet. Gail wanted something cleaner than her previous site, modern and clean without adding too much content or resources to the process.

The new site included a bold dynamic header, updated navigation titles, a new contact form plugin, and several small text and image updates.

We migrated the development site to the new site, using a specific mix of tools, and after a few last tweaks, declared the project done.

While no website is ever really finished in the land of the ever updating internet, this project concluded. It’s been a joy and an honor to work with Gail on this, and for so long. Thanks Gail.