SFNdesign

Category: Project Philosophy

  • My guide to keeping your site running and happy

    One of the things that’s super frustrating is to find out that your site is down. Doesn’t matter the reason, it’s time when your readers and customers are not going to your site and getting your content or purchasing your products.

    Today I’m going to talk about the plan I use with clients to keep their site up and running and how I help them have 24/7support for their site, even when I’m out of town or hiking in the mountains.

    Hosting

    My host of choice is Siteground particularly their ‘GoGeeky’ plan. It’s inexpensive and their caching is fast.

    Their support is amazing, with tickets being resolved often times within minutes of being submitted. I’ve put in 3 tickets to Siteground and had them all resolved in the time it’s taken other hosts to simply respond to a ticket they had an 8 hour head start on.

    Honourable mentions here go to WP Engine and Page.ly. I’ve been on both services before and chose to head over to Siteground because it had some ‘nerdy’ features that neither of the two options above had.

    It’s quite likely that you don’t know what WP CLI is or how to use it in which case none of those nerdy features matter to you and either of the 2 options above are great places you should look at.

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    Support

    I’m not setup for 24/7 support. Your first line of defence here is your host which is a reason I recommend Siteground since they are so fast.

    But what if it’s something that Siteground can’t quite take care of? What if you need a bit more than they can take care of?

    Here is where WP Site Care comes in. This is an awesome team of WordPress professionals that can help you 24/7 with small issues on your site. They provide security monitoring, plugin updates, SEO Optimization and a few other awesome things.

    I set all my long term clients up with this service so that when I’m away on the weekend and they have something their host can’t help with they have a resource to work with.

    Backup

    For backup I take a 2 pronged approach. My first stop (if you’re only going to use one service) is VaultPress. VaultPress provides a nearly realtime backup of your site. So that means a few minutes after you add the latest blog post, it’s backed up.

    My second stop is to set clients up on Manage WP. Here I setup 3 snapshot backups for them. One is a daily full site backup and the other 2 are set at different times of the day to catch the database (all your posts, pages and content but not the images you uploaded).

    I choose two options because the chances of both of them going down and not backing up is very small. I choose offsite options because if your server has a hack it’s entirely possible that the backups on your server will be also compromised in some way and then you have no ‘clean’ copy of your site.

    I choose automatic backup options because there is no way anyone is going to remember to back up the sites every day many times a day. You’ll forget and when you forget something will happen and you’ll need a backup and you won’t have one.

    Now none of these options absolve you from going in and making sure that the backups are actually happening. I put it on my schedule to log in to Manage WP once a week and make sure that the backups are working.

    Again, the times you don’t check are the times you’re going to find that they were not happening automatically and then you will have an issue and you won’t have a backup.

    Updates

    Unfortunately many clients miss this crucial part of making sure that their site stays online. It’s not uncommon for me to get a panicked call from someone I worked with a year ago and they have been hacked and they want me to fix things.

    When I check the site out, nothing has been updated since I worked on the site.

    You need to keep your plugins and themes and WordPress itself up to date all the time. In all the years I’ve been building WordPress sites there are only a handful of times that an upgrade has actually done anything ‘bad’ to a site and even then it’s been so minor we just turned off the plugin and figured out a solution.

    If you’re running an older version of WordPress then you can be sure that you have known security issues on your site and you’re choosing to run an insecure Web site.

    For those of you running eCommerce businesses (which is most of my clients) you actually need to keep it all up to date to stay abreast of PCI guidelines. If you have a security breach and client information gets out then you could lose your merchant account, which means no more charging plastic.

    Yup that’s pretty serious.

    Since we have multiple types of backup running we know that we can fairly easily roll back to ‘stable’ version of a site which means that having an update go ‘bad’ is really of little consequence.

    Keep your sites up to date and you’re going to resolve most issues that people have with uptime. I update client sites once a week which is enough to stay on top of any updates that need to be done.

    There you have it, you now know my ‘secret’ method to have the highest possible uptime on my client sites. You can see how I make sure they are backed up and how often I keep them up to date to do our best to make sure that security issues aren’t found on the site.

    photo credit: julochka cc

  • Here is why I choose to build stuff on the web

    Here is why I choose to build stuff on the web

    I’m not the type of person to regret much. I generally live a happy life regardless of what’s going on around me. I’m upbeat most of the time.

    I could be doing many things with my life and be happy about them. I’d be fulfilled with many jobs but I choose to help people have awesome Web sites that make them sales.

    Of bikes and outside

    I talk about it on my process page before, I like to ride my bike. It’s more than that though, I just like to be outside.

    I take my kids on a hike at least one day of the week 3 of 4 weekends a month. I think that many, actually most people now spend way to much time in front of their computers and screens. Yes that’s very ironic for someone that is using a screen as he writes this.

    I could be happy being a bike mechanic. I’d get to work with my hands all day and help people enjoy their life more while they get a bit more fit. I’d help commuters have a reliable bike to ride to work/school every day.

    I’d get to talk about bikes all day, which is something I think about.

    I could be happy being an outdoor guide (a former profession). Taking people in to the mountains and making the experience is pleasurable is awesome. Taking teenagers for their first real experiences outside is my real favourite pastime.

    When I first got married my wife and I were the offsite trip leaders at a camp and we had a young lady from an ‘alternative’ school. For her it meant that no other school would take her but this school for difficult girls.

    She was certainly difficult to start the trip. She didn’t want to carry anything when we had to move our group gear. She didn’t want to serve anyone, but wanted everyone to serve her.

    This attitude came to a culmination on the second day when we had to carry our canoes and all the gear between lakes. It was her turn to carry one of the heaviest packs but she refused. She said that it was too hard and she didn’t come here to work hard that was my job.

    I simply said that was her choice, but no one was going to touch that pack but her and we couldn’t leave till we had it with us. Then I laid back in my canoe and pulled my hat over my face while she yelled and took a nap. Yup I fell asleep and about 30 minutes later my wife woke me up to say she was going back to get the bag.

    So I joined her and helped her put it on (while I carried nothing) and when it pulled her off balance and over I helped her stand up. When she took it off and left again I laid back down and pulled my hat over my face on the trail and attempted to nap again.

    We got the bag where it needed to be and a few days later she told me that no one had ever told here she could do something hard, then made her do it. Her whole life people let her off the hook as soon as she complained that a job was hard.

    That young lady went from barely being allowed to stay in her ‘special’ school to the class president and valedictorian. Her and her husband guide climbing, canoeing, skiing, and rock climbing to this day and she says it’s the fault of my wife and I making her work hard.

    That’s a life I changed and the opportunity to do that again is something I’d jump at and be happy with as a job.

    Okay so why Web sites?

    Now the question is why do I build help people have awesome Web sites when I could be working with teenagers and spending my time outside with them?

    Building Web sites helps me have similar leverage over people’s success. One of my favourite clients is Greater Impact. They help ladies have awesome marriages. Each extra person I can help purchase the course is someone that I can help affect.

    But the affect doesn’t stop there. It means that this family has a better relationship all the way down to the kids. It means this lady can affect other friends and help them have better marriages. It means that she’s likely happier and that’s going to affect everyone around her.

    I’d be happy being outside, but the work I do now has a huge reach and I want to reach far and wide.

    photo credit: julochka cc

  • Why we document our code

    Over on WP Theme Tutorial I just wrote a post about why we document all our code for a project.

    In short, you’re going to be a better developer because of it and you’re going to make it easier to work on in the future.

    For our client projects it means that a future developer can pick up the project and have a big head start on what’s happening and the thought processes behind our work.

    Skipping documentation is a good sign of a lazy developer. Then you have to wonder where else they cut corners.