The Day My Site Crashed (& I confessed to cheating)

The first 4 months of My Bespoke Chair were spent setting up all the social media requirements of a modern, online business. Job done, boxes ticked, virtual world navigated and mapped. Happy days. Love my online community. Everyone rocks!

But no sooner has one obstacle been overcome, the next looms. And it's more terrifying and less appealing then Pinterest boards, Facebook reach and Twitter #@lingo.... Technology: WP plug-ins, API keys, video embedding, HTML codes, autoresponders, downloads and uploads. Not to mention passwords for every breathe I take.

Google is my IT tutor, my know-it-all mentor. I Google everything techy and it inevitable tells me to watch a YouTube tutorial. I watch endless videos of clever, techy people zipping their mouse across the screen, clicking methodically and instructively. Easy. Simple. Just do this step, then do that step. Done.

Last week, I needed a simple WordPress plug-in to be installed. I decided not to use my actual web developer, but to try out a web company who will "tweak" your site. No contracts, you pay by the "tweak". Seemed fool-proof. To cut a long story short, it was a stressful nightmare for 7 days.

Ok - I can do this myself instead. So, I asked Google and YouTube. I tried installing the WordPress opt-in box to the My Bespoke Chair homepage myself. It's a little dialogue box that appears inviting you to sign up for a newsletter. Nice companies offer you a thank you gift. We're nice; we give you $300 off your perfect chair when you sign up for our newsletter. Then fortnightly, we'll email you a pretty newsletter packed with useful interior design tips, special offers and behind-the-scenes news.

I digress...

It went horribly wrong. The site seemed to crash. When I typed in the URL I saw something like this. My reaction frightened the children. I thought I was going to die.

I made a frantic, embarrassed call to my actual web developer, Matt - at 9pm on a Friday night. Miraculously, he answered, listened patiently and non-judgementally to my choked ramblings...then fixed it in a flash. Back to his beer and NCIS on the TV (I made that bit up)

Lessons learnt: It's OK and necessary to be in charge of your own back-end CMS. Adding new text, pages, images, keeping the site's content fresh and tweaking here and there. WordPress is brilliant and easy to use, even on a site as complex as My Bespoke Chair.  But just because everything is "figure-outable" through Google, YouTube and other sites, doesn't mean you should. A wrongly placed < > and you're doomed. Leave the fiddly stuff to your web developer and stick with what you're excellent at.

Until I can employ an IT/web manager in-house, I shall never again cheat on my web designer and developer.  You always get caught....

(go see the finished result here and sign up....I'm very happy now and it's already proving a success with new subscriber sign-ups increasing)

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