Website Woes
I used to work for a newspaper, then a print shop, then the newspaper again, now a website design company. All of these have had the same parent company. I've been here roughly 10+ years and I've seen many facets of design. I've done just about everything that can be done, often times accept the leadership position when necesary, but frankly prefer to just do the grunt work and improve efficiency whenever I can. I haven't posted here in forever, but this one came up and it just made me think of this community.
This website design company has been mismanaged, then mismanaged again, and frankly we've done some of our customers wrong. I let a LOT of things slide because of this. I get it, you're frustrated, you're tired of the jerking around you got by the previous leadership. That doesn't, however, mean that you get to change the base rules of what our service IS or how it WORKS. We create sites and host them on a dedicated server we own. That is our job, that is what we do. If you want to leave, I understand. I'm all about building loyal customers, and if you're so unhappy that we'll never be able to make it right, I'll at least try to make the transition smooth for you. This one customer, however...
It was created before I transitioned to this company, not by me, but I understand how the backend works and have helped the people out with a few things since I got here. It's set up to where you make edits on a staging version of the site, then push those changes live and I automated that for them, for example, so they don't need to request we do that every time since they make changes often. They have called three times now to insist they have a DIFFERENT company "hosting" their site. Inbetween these calls I've also received a call because they had an issue updating their site, which I fixed. How did they possibly know to call us, if we're not their host? Now, I know people can be confused by technology, but this is the third time now, so I decided to suspend their site to show our accountant that we obviously are their host. If we weren't their host it would have zero effect. Of course, it suspends the site. (As I fully suspected, because their DNS is pretty clearly pointing at our server AND we registered their domain name, which points to our nameservers.)
I went ahead and unsuspended it because they've got until the end of the month to pay the monthly hosting fee, but this should get real interesting if they choose to continue insisting they have a different host. Additionally, I'd love to know what they're paying someone who's doing literally nothing for them, and how to get into that business.
This website design company has been mismanaged, then mismanaged again, and frankly we've done some of our customers wrong. I let a LOT of things slide because of this. I get it, you're frustrated, you're tired of the jerking around you got by the previous leadership. That doesn't, however, mean that you get to change the base rules of what our service IS or how it WORKS. We create sites and host them on a dedicated server we own. That is our job, that is what we do. If you want to leave, I understand. I'm all about building loyal customers, and if you're so unhappy that we'll never be able to make it right, I'll at least try to make the transition smooth for you. This one customer, however...
It was created before I transitioned to this company, not by me, but I understand how the backend works and have helped the people out with a few things since I got here. It's set up to where you make edits on a staging version of the site, then push those changes live and I automated that for them, for example, so they don't need to request we do that every time since they make changes often. They have called three times now to insist they have a DIFFERENT company "hosting" their site. Inbetween these calls I've also received a call because they had an issue updating their site, which I fixed. How did they possibly know to call us, if we're not their host? Now, I know people can be confused by technology, but this is the third time now, so I decided to suspend their site to show our accountant that we obviously are their host. If we weren't their host it would have zero effect. Of course, it suspends the site. (As I fully suspected, because their DNS is pretty clearly pointing at our server AND we registered their domain name, which points to our nameservers.)
I went ahead and unsuspended it because they've got until the end of the month to pay the monthly hosting fee, but this should get real interesting if they choose to continue insisting they have a different host. Additionally, I'd love to know what they're paying someone who's doing literally nothing for them, and how to get into that business.