March 2008

Do You Have a Disaster Plan?

After a week of feeling very tired with a nagging "catch" in my side, I suddenly found myself admitted to the emergency room with chest pains and shortness of breath on February 1st. The diagnosis was a very severe case of pneumonia with some complications thrown in. It was a shock to find myself in ICU hooked up to more monitors and IVs than I could name. The hospital stay stretched into 18 days. (Who knew you could have pneumonia with no fever and no cough!)

I was in a panic over my business. There was no plan in place for this. Who would answer emails, handle template questions, respond to customers, pay the bills, etc.?

Luckily my husband and daughter were able to keep up with most things (with a lot of coaching and written instructions). My good friend and fellow template designer Marsha (of Templates in Time) also stepped up to bat and replied to emails that were forwarded to her from my family.

It was a slap-dash system at best and some customer emails were accidentally deleted or went unanswered. Some first-time customers were undoubtedly lost because of this.

So who would take care of your business if you were unable to do so? I'm in the process of putting together a single document that gives detailed instructions on how my business runs -- everything from usernames and passwords, to bills that need to be paid, and including where things are filed on my computer.

So get a flu shot every year, get the pneumonia shot every five years, and get a written operational plan in place for your business. :-)

The Rush to Publish

Once you've downloaded your new template, you're excited about making changes. You work hard to set up a logical navigation system, labored long over your wording, optimized all of your images so that they are as small in file size as possible and yet still sharp and clear. Finally you have each and every page perfect. So now it's time to publish....right? Nope, not yet. There's still some details to see to before your site goes live.

• Preview all pages by going to File > Preview in Browser. It's a good idea to check your site in more than one browser. This is a good way to spot, and thus correct, any issues before your site goes live. Don't just assume that once your site is published that things will magically appear correctly.
   
• Change the page title on the home page. In our templates, we place the name of the template as the page title on the index page. Unless you want your visitors to see the template name, you are going to want to change it to your site name. Search engines such as Google have very long memories and it can take a long time before any corrections are indexed.
   
• Reset any form properties so that you receive any form emails rather than us. It's amazing how often this is overlooked! If you are testing your form and are not getting the results sent to your email address, chances are you have not set the form properties. If you are not sure how to change this, you can view a short tutorial on our Help Center site:
  http://www.rtbwizards.com/helpcenter/formsresults.htm
   
• Either delete or modify the keywords and description meta tags on each page. We supply these meta tags on each page within the template, however you need to change the text. If you are unsure what meta tags are and what they do (and don't do), you need to read this article:
  http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167931
   
• Spell check each page. Yes, both Expression Web and FrontPage do have an automatic spell check feature, but it never hurts to give each page another go. Just to Tools > Spelling or hit F7. This only checks the spelling of individuals words as does check the context. Have a friend give your pages a quick once over, too.
   
• If there are pages you don't need but you don't want to delete, just mark them "Do not publish". In folder view, right-click on the page and select the Do Not Publish option. Now when you publish your site, these pages will not be uploaded. Don't forget to check that you don't have links to pages that will not be used in your site!
   
• If you already have an existing site, but want to see how your new site will look, you can publish to a subweb on your current site first. This is an excellent way to get a live sneak peek and test your forms. Just publish to a location similar to http://www.yoursite.com/test/. Fast and easy and you are then able to see and correct mistakes before overwriting your old site with the new one. When everything is perfect, you can always delete the test web later.