Web Site Overhaul

I have a confession to make. When I first launched the web site for SOHO It Goes, January 2003, it was a very slap dash, unplanned affair. Having just come through the dot com disaster, job hunted for a year, got a job and was fired because the other secretaries "hated me" (boo hoo), I was freaking out and decided to throw everything I had into a new business. I launched the site within a week - zip, bam, boom - off to find new clients. Two and a half years later, I've come to regret about 90% of my choices in the architecture of the site. For one thing - being in a hurry, I threw it together without a template or set of styles. For another, I never in my wildest dreams imagined radio shows, blogs, huge directories of free articles, or info products for sale!

I grew, it grew, I wrote, it grew, and after a while, my short sitedness caught up with me. So, last week, I decided to redo every page with a new navigation menu, new information architecture and a better plan for the future. To my utter disbelief, I discovered that I had put somewhere in the realm of 150+ pages of content on my web site in 2.5 years. That's conservative - and its not counting blog postings. Good grief!

Anyway - after staying up nearly all night every night this week (because client work takes up much of my days), I finally put it all online tonite. My goals were to:

* Keep the same basic look - nothing really wrong with the collage and it gets compliments
* Design a new, more updated navigation for the vast amount of free resources and information I've written
* Put the whole dang blasted thing in templates with new and improved style sheet
* Move the blog, info products and my other two web businesses to the top so people can find out about them
* Reduce content in some areas, add other things like "solutions" to make it clearer who I work with and what I do for them

I'm sure I'll be working out the kinks and finding 'gotchas' for another week but, back and neck aching, I think I've done it.

So check out the new SOHO It Goes (hit Refresh in your browser if it looks screwy - IE is caching old pages big time!) and let me know what you think!

Another reason to love Crystal Tech

There is probably a time when a web designer needs to just unplug and go to sleep but I stayed in the office beyond that moment tonite because it seemed like a disproportionate number of clients were having trouble with their sites. Actually, everyone having trouble today is a "edit your own site" client. Which means - they wanted to edit their own content, I set them up with whatever the best solution is at the moment within their budget, and then the fun begins. Because no one really has created a tool for do it yourself site owners that offers the right combination of flexibility and protection against causing things to go awry, I seem to spend more time trying to sort out corners my clients have coded themselves into than I used to just maintaining the sites! And yet, I'd lose massive amounts of business if I refused to create 'edit your own' sites.

Anyway - back to my wonder web hosting company, Crystal Tech: I stayed up way too late trying to resolve a number of different issues clients had with their sites, and in doing so, inadvertently overwrote the style sheet of a site, without having made a copy. The intent was simply to add more line spacing - but I didn't realize that the guys at Edit.com had tweaked my style sheet during set up, and I had just hosed their change. My last back up of the site wouldn't have had that change either. Gulp!

Tired beyond the point of being able to recode a style sheet when I wasn't even sure what had been done, I also hated the idea of my client waking up in the morning to find their site doing wierd things, before I had a chance to enlist help. And THEN I remembered that Crystal Tech had a new feature called Restore in the control panel of the site. I zipped over there, chose yesterday for my date, picked that one file to restore and voila - I was back in business.

Phew! Crystal Tech, my hero. Bless you guys in Texas for making the daily back ups accessible to your clients.

News 8/30/05 - no sooner than I wrote this, CT announced the service was out of testing and would now cost $10 per use (whether one file or a whole site). If you've hosed something important by accident, this is a small price to pay for salvation.