I’m not always working on big projects – I am also found coming to the rescue on small ones. In this case Gary from Sublime Installations had fallen out with a big Yell-ow company who were hosting his website. This is roughly how our first conversation went.
Hi Angie, I’ve been given your name as someone who can help me
OK, that’s really good to hear! How can I help?
I had a site but it’s been taken down, I need a new site – how much is a 5 page site?
Well, it depends what’s on the 5 pages, but firstly do you still have the domain name?
Yes, they have released my the domain name, they said I just had to send them something – an IPS tag
Great – that’s really good news, sometimes start-ups don’t actually own their domain name.
Do you have any hosting?No, can you host it?
I could, but that’s really not a good idea
Why? I don’t know anything about hosting
Well, God forbid anything happened to me, your site would be gone again. You need to have control of your domain name and your hosting. (We had a bit of to-and-froing here, but was finally convinced!)
I Googled his company and came up with two search results – I copied the URLs and the descriptions so that we re-use them and could keep that ‘Google juice’. He hadn’t any record of what he’d had on the pages text-wise, as he had mostly used lots of images, so for content, all I had to play with was those search results and his Facebook page.
I gave Gary a link to a hosting company I use a lot – ethical, helpful, responsive, real nice guys. He bought an entry-level shared hosting. He gave me access to his account. I installed WordPress, my favourite theme Divi & my ‘go to’ plugins.
I made a holding page then built the pages two pages that had come up in the search results, optimised the images he wanted to use, created a home and contact page, plus a blog page to index pages for news on his new projects or techniques when he had them. When Gary was happy with these we made it all live. This was all done pretty much over a long weekend.
The good news for Gary, is that he has a site he won’t lose again, and he can have as many pages as he likes – because it’s WordPress!