A charity recently contacted me because through no fault of their own their website had vanished. Their calls and emails to the hosting company were simply being ignored and many weeks later they had received no explanation or resumption of service. These are the decisions we had to make quickly to get their website up-and-running again…
Decision 1: Do we rescue the old domain and hosting or start afresh?
We could have transferred the domain elsewhere but the hosting company were being uncooperative which might hold up the process. If the old website had been very popular then I would have worried about loss of traffic if we switched domain, but that wasn’t the case. So we bought a new domain name (for under £7) and hosting from www.names.co.uk, a big, reliable company that I’ve used many times before.
Note: when the new domain is in use we’ll have to contact every website that has a link to the old domain and request they amend it.
Decision 2: Do we restore the original website design or create another?
Using the Wayback Machine I was able to see that the old website had static html pages. The easiest option in the short-term would have been to restore those old pages (assuming the organisation had a backup, which they didn’t); but in the long-term they would struggle to keep them updated. So we agreed to replace the old site with one based around a content management system.
Note: we will have to re-upload the textual content but that’s a fairly routine copy and paste job.
Decision 3: How can we create a new website with limited resources?
Obviously this turn of events hadn’t been planned or budgeted for, so not much money was available, certainly not enough to design a new site from scratch. Also, time was short. So we decided to install a free and open source content management system. We chose WordPress because it’s quick to install and easy to learn (plus it has a simple backup facility!). Then we chose a free template theme downloaded from a choice of hundreds on the Internet.
Note: even a free and open source product has to be installed and configured and learnt to use – and there are costs involved if you have to pay someone else to help you do this. Sadly, nothing is ever really free.
