My last post let you in on great information that I learned when I went to another incredible Internet Marketing Bookcamp last week. Armed with a notebook thick with notes, the next logical step was to make my Do Lists while everything was fresh on my mind. I love learning! I love checking off everything I have accomplished on my Do Lists!
As I shared with you last time, watching and listening to website critiques and make-overs was brutal. We ( you and I ) design or choose website designs that WE like. We are supposed to create everything for YOU. Our visitors. Our readers. Our customers and clients.
I consider myself a “student of the business”, so my web designer and I started in on a major redesign for Five Star Seminars. After that brutal surgery, Colorado Safety Educators would come under the redesign knife.
Following the guidelines I had learned, we spent hours redesigning Five Star Seminars to fall in line with cutting edge marketing strategies. I left and my designer finished up.
Then, I got a phone call.
A very soft voice told me that she had completely destroyed our Colorado Safety Educators’ website while uploading our Five Star Seminars website.
I started laughing…what was I going to do? A simple republishing would fix it…right?
To quote my father…”as the plot sickens…”
My Internet Marketing mentor had just told us a month ago to move our websites. He highly recommended Liquid Web because real people answer the phones 24/7. He taught that when your website goes down, you need a real person, right now! (Not email tickets going back and forth that could take hours for a reply to your urgent need.)
Moving to www.liquidweb.com was on my Do List. I just wanted to fix all the websites first.
This is what happened to us. What an incredible lesson we learned!
2 pm: I left my extremely talented web designer to finish and upload changes to the server.
6pm: She was still having no luck getting changes published successfully.
7:30pm: She calls…beside herself that she had somehow completely destroyed www.coloradosafetyeducators.org while uploading www.fivestarseminars.com
7:31pm: I call our wonderful webmaster and he and our designer try to figure out what she did.
7:40pm: Our webmaster puts in a ticket with our server telling them that we have an urgent situation.
(tick, tick, tick, tick……..)
9am the next morning: He finally gets an email reply and begins to reconstruct our website. It took over 13 hours for our server to respond. This was a huge disaster!
Do you know that if your website trips out, your emails don’t work either……..so no one could communicate with me at all from my business cards.
I had given out a great many business cards at this Internet Marketing Bootcamp and these entrepreneurs and business people found no website at all. To make matter worse, what was there said that our account was suspended and to check with the billing department. Our account is completely paid up. What do we look like to the world?
Thirteen hours for a server to respond is NOT acceptable.
www.coloradosafetyeducators.org is back up and has a NEW look on the landing page. Come take a look!
I share this disaster with you so that YOU…NEVER…EVER…have to experience this kind of situation. I should have moved my websites as soon as my mentor shared his warning that the last thing we ever would want to happen was to have a website go down and couldn’t get immediate technical support from real people 24/7 to help fix the emergency.
Not only are we packing our bags and mov’in everything on over to Liquid Web, but they have a FANTASTIC affiliate referral program. We have learned the hard way the value of 24/7 live support, and talking with real, wonderfully helpful human beings, when your website goes down and completely disappears.
We are proud to now be Preferred Partners in an excellent Referral Program with Liquid Web. If you are interested in outstanding, live, technical suppport, please use our affiliate link at the bottom of each of our webpages at Colorado Safety Educators, or tell them “Barbara Scott” sent you.
Business Tip: If you are aware of the power of Affiliate Marketing, I encourage you to take a look at not only their services, but their Referral Program as well. It is an outstanding business opportunity.
Think of this post as a mini-SAFETY SEMINAR for your BUSINESS, and a highly responsive 911 web number for YOU in times of need. Great or small.
May you never…ever…watch your website disappear.
All my best to you!
Barbara Scott
