Website Woes

I'm far from a professional website-builder but, because my small business is still less than a year old, and barely in the black, I do all my own website work (http://www.webajeb.com/). There was a definite learning curve there but with the help of the technical folks at Crystal Tech (where my website is hosted) and their on-line web-building tool, I actually built quite a nice website. I even learned a little about html so that I could make a tweak or two to the source code. There were a few little flaws in my design that I wasn't totally happy with but I learned to live with them.

Well, yesterday I got it into my head that at long last I was going to fix one of those little flaws. I wanted all my main category links (like About Us, Pricing, and Specials) in the header of the website, instead of some up there, and the rest in the body of each page. It is during the "build" process that those links are created, and they are not directly editable once they have been created. Plus, I kinda wanted to change the template I was using to something a little simpler and cleaner looking. So I stepped through the build process using the tool provided by Crystal Tech, choosing a new template, and specifying the links I wanted to display in the header.

What I didn't realize was that the tool was creating BLANK pages for the header links and, since the names of those links (or web pages) were the same as before, my original web pages with all the cool content I had slaved over, were overwritten!!! AUGH!

Eighty percent of my website was hosed! Gone! Kaput!

After some spinning around the room and swearing (luckily my husband wasn't at home at the time), I tried to calm down and THINK. I realized I had back-up copies of a few of the lost web pages so I restored those. Then I simply sat myself down and plugged through re-creating the rest. Since I originally built the website and have tweaked it a hundred times over the last 8 months, I was able to dredge most of it up from memory. The build process didn't delete ANY of my image files so I didn't have to search them down on my hard-drive and re-upload, so that was a big help.

I'm 95% done now and, what do you know? I like the website better now than I did before! And I learned some new stuff, too, like always keep back-up copies of every website page! I actually have two backup copies of each page now: one on-line, and one on my hard-drive.

How much you want to bet I never need them???

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