Tuesday 14 May 2019

The cost of a DIY website

Having no paying clients (yet), and considerable running costs (AFSL monthly fees & mandatory CRM/SOA software subscription of around $1,400 per month), I've been trying to setup my financial planning business on a shoe-string budget (especially as I also have to pay the fees for my postgrad uni courses in financial planning - which work out to be around $1,100 per month). This has meant cutting costs by having a 'home office' (yet to be organised) and also by choosing to spend the time constructing my own Wordpress business website, rather than paying a 'professional' website designer to do so.

The obvious down-side of this approach is that I've spent a lot of time over the past 4-5 months fiddling around with Wordpress to get my website done, and while the resulting website looks OK it has pathetic page load speeds (even after using an image optimizer plugin to reduce total image filesizes by about 75%). The less obvious problem with the DIY approach was that when the website blew up during a routine upgrade of Wordpress (casusing a server error '500'), I was left floundering when the recommended fixes for such an error didn't get things working. (In case you think I don't know what I'm doing, you're probably right, but since I have a Grad Dip in IT I should be able to fix a common problem arising from a standard housekeeping task in Wordpress!)

This has left me with a) a website not working since Saturday evening, b) several hours spent trying to 'fix' the problem by renaming htaccess file, plugins folder etc. with no result, c) about half an hour spent of the phone with GoDaddy's 'free' help service (its only free in the sense that since I'm already paying for GoDaddy products, they don't charge extra for doing some basic trouble-shooting if the products stop working) with no progress, and c) finally having to pay another fee to get some 'Premium support' to get my Wordpress site back up and running (hopefully). The minimum cost to get the WP issue fixed is A$65 (for one 'credit'), but I decided to pay a bit extra ($111.06) to purchase three 'credits' - the first one will hopefully get my website back up, and I can then use the second credit to try to improve/optimize my website performance. I'll keep the third 'credit' in reserve in case something goes wrong when I try installing and using a backup/restore plugin like 'BackWPup'.

The initial service ticket should now take 'up to' 72 hours to get done, so I'll have ended up with my website offline for almost a week by the time it gets resolved. Fortunately, with no clients (nor even prospects making enquiries) as yet, I don't think it will make much difference whether or not my website was 'up' this week. All I've had to do is temporarily deactivate my Google Ads until my website is available again.

The positives out of all this are that I've learned more than I really wanted to about how Wordpress works (or doesn't work), and I've still ended up 'only' spending about $200 all up (including the maintenance fee) to get my business website registered, hosted, and setup. Getting it done by a 'professional' website designer would have probably cost several thousand dollars for the sort of website I've ended up with, and then any future changes would have meant paying additional fees.

Overall I'm not very impressed by the robustness of Wordpress - having it fail during a routine version upgrade, and not to be able to simply revert (automatically) to the previous, working version seems very primitive. Rather than have backup/restore plugins available as extra, this feature should be built in to the basic Wordpress installation.

And I'm also not very impressed by GoDaddy help - while the cost of 'premium' technical service is quite reasonable when you need it (assuming it actually gets my problem solved - fingers crossed). You shouldn't need to pay for something as basic as reverting to the previous, working setup when something goes wrong - that is, I don't see why a basic backup/restore feature isn't included when you are paying for 'deluxe' hosting.

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