I don’t know what to say other than yesterday was a bit of a train wreck. Not how I wanted to start the year at all. Our German client had given us some incomplete information on his web server — which also, we discovered was not set up properly for the site . So what should have been a 30-60 minute project to launch a site (it’s a relatively simple procedure, we have a checklist) turned into an all-day affair, and it still isn’t working quite right.
The big issue in this case is that our client has a server admin who is in charge of his servers — it’s a tech company, so this is expected — but the client insisted on going live during a time where his server person is on an extended vacation.
So essentially we’re sitting thousands of miles away looking at a server console, with no background for what has been configured and what has not, no access to the person who set it up, no access to tech support for the hosting company (it’s in German), and basically trying to fumble our way through a site launch through trial and error.
It was extraordinarily frustrating. Our senior developer Michael comes back from New Year’s today and I’m hoping that he can help us solve the one remaining issue, a redirect loop that happens on the home page when you switch the language from German to English. A redirect loop is caused when a page tries to forward traffic to itself, causing a chain of events that can never be resolved. This is only happening on the home page when you try to switch languages, the others seem to work fine.
The other two launches we had yesterday went fine, so that was nice. Meat Loaf says that two out of three ain’t bad, but in our case, the one we missed on was a gruesome crap demon from hell.
Otherwise, I did some work on a website for a market research company that does win-loss analysis — they take some of your past and present clients through a guided interview process and learn what people like about working with you and what they don’t like about working with you and so it helps you refine your process to close gaps and be more effective in both sales and customer retention.
We’re trading these guys the web work in exchange for a win-loss project for us. They’ve already interviewed five of our clients and in a couple of weeks, I’ll learn something about the results. Hopefully I’ll learn that people like me.
I expect that none of those people are, right now, in Germany.