by Bianca Gubalke
Website Maintenance Service
Once a website or blog is set up and properly configured and looks spot-on, the real journey only starts!
What counts now is to post regular original content in a smart, well-edited way… and to see that things are and keep running smoothly, 24/7/365. If your Website is just a means to an end, meaning you have a business to run and that’s your prime focus – then you are well advised to invest in a reliable and professional Website Maintenance Service.
Website Maintenance Service
With the current speed of upgrades – be it Wordpress or Plugins – this could become a day-filling job alone, especially if you have set up a network of blogs to promote your business.
If you as the Web Designer create a blog – say on a Wordpress based Semiomantics Script – my advice would be to offer a Website Maintenance Service on a monthly subscription basis. It is important that a client understands what this entails – and that he actually would be completely lost without it unless he has some profound IT knowledge and the passion and time and nerves to dig into it on a daily basis.
Since Web2.0 things aren’t getting easier, well to the contrary. Here’s today’s example followed by a helpful tip:
WordPress Updates
Logging into my Author Blog today, the first thing I see that – after just a few days – the next WordPress 2.9. 1 update has been released! Now you’ve got to check what this entails and what implications it has on what you’ve set up so far. Some updates work sort of automatically through the Dashboard of your blog – others need a manual download to your harddrive and from there an upload to your server, overwriting the existing files. With slow Internet connections and really lousy lines down here in South Africa, this is a tedious job – but it has to be done.
Plugin Updates
It’s all a chain reaction: one update leads to the next… then a bug is being discovered and whoopsi! here comes the next update and so on.
I had 3 Plugin Updates in my Author Blog today – and one of them caused a mess… and it wasn’t until I investigated the issue with my code-spiffy friend from France, Laetitia Paris, that together with a lot of testing and thinking and swearing and drinking (virtual Champagne only of course!) we found the solution. We decided to share it with you, our loyal readers. It will save you time and frustrations….
Collapsing Categories Plugin – Problematic Update
Before writing my post this morning, I updated all my plugins, including the Collapsing Categories Plugin.
When I checked my published post, I suddenly discovered that, in the left sidebar widget where all my Categories were situated in a ‘collapsing’ manner, all posts of the corresponding category came with a red underline that exceded the frame of the widget. I had never seen this and first thought of Fontburner, that had caused us a lot of headaches in the past as well – but that wasn’t the reason. Now i wondered whether my site or line or ISP were caching and asked Laetitia – she saw the same thing. However, she did in Firefox and she didn’t in Internet Explorer. This alone is a nightmare at times – but at least we saw the same thing. Checking the Collpasing Categories Code for anything that indicated something ‘underlines’ lead to nothing as well.
So we discussed the possibilities and tested… and to cut the long story short: the solution is to go – under Settings – into your Collapsing Categories.
Here you highlight and copy the following:
border:0;
and then you paste it a bit further down into the code so you get the following picture:
#sidebar ul.collapsing.categories.list li.collapsing.categories.post {
text-indent:-1em;
padding-left:1em;
border:0;
margin:0 0 0 1em;}
Then save it all and the mess clears up like magic!
Which reminds me that I still have to do exactly that for someone else as part of my Website Maintenance Service!
Read more…
