So I had been meaning to update my site for a long time. Don’t get me wrong, I liked how my old site looked. It was still one of my favorite revamps to date, but it just didn’t flow as well as I wanted it to, and it was really hard to update. In fact, I had some work up there that wasn’t even valid anymore. Some of my client’s had moved on from my work; I’d become obsolete in their eyes. (No hard feeling to these client’s, I’m glad your continuing on refreshing your sites!)
Even though I knew this, I was stuck in a rut, I didn’t know the style I wanted to go with, I didn’t know if I wanted to maintain a single page site, would I switch to WordPress or continue with a hand coded site, when was I going to find the time to design and develop this thing? And like most designers with full time jobs, I put my site redesign on the back-burner for when things died down and I had “time” to think of all of these issues.
Then, I got my android phone and I wanted to see what my site looked like on the tiny screen and that’s when I saw it, those dreaded words from Host Papa telling me that my site had been suspended. Suspended?! WTF for? I got in touch with them and they too were perplexed. They sent a message to the higher ups and I finally got a response. Someone hacked my site. My site. A site that doesn’t exactly get millions of page views.
Brilliant.
But it gets better. HostPapa has to delete my corrupted files along with the healthy files, which I completely and totally understand from a security point of view; from my personal point of view (read: I didn’t back up most of my work and my server had become really a convenient storage space for stuff I wanted but didn’t know where to put) it was a disaster. Not only did I not have my most recent HTML files backed up, the files I did have were so old that it’d be like starting from scratch to get them into the shape they were before this disaster.
So what did I do? I quickly put up a coming soon page and got to work on designing a new site. After all, I’d been meaning to do this for half a year now.
The outcome? Well, it took me about 3 days from start to finish to: get inspired, mock up a design, figure out what content I want displayed, and code the site. Three days of work that I’d been putting off for months.
The lesson learned?
1. Back up your files
2. Stop procrastinating
3. Pressure really seems to get me working as quickly and efficiently as possible.
So yes, it sucks that my site was shut down, because some hacker wanted to play around with my site. Am I angry at this person? Not really (though, hacker, if you’re reading this, please have mercy on my freshly created site). I needed/wanted to create a new site, I’d been procrastinating and this site suspension was a blessing in disguise. A blessing I hope never to have repeated again.
Here’s a screen grab of the new look:
Tags: hostpapa, lessons, redesign, web design, website
