Why Website Maintenance Matters

Houston Selfie Co., an entertainment company in the Bayou City - Houston, TX area that provides photobooths and personalized photo keepsakes for parties and events, reached out to me after receiving unsolicited emails from SEO agencies about their website's performance.

Having worked together on previous projects, they trusted me to evaluate their actual SEO needs.

My first approach was to run a site audit to check the pulse of the website's SEO for a general idea of where we stood and possibly understanding why the client was receiving these emails. The report showed missing meta tags and several coding issues affecting the speed and loading time.

Once I accessed the website dashboard, I discovered that the website was running on an outdated WordPress version and most of the extensions and plugins were also outdated. Furthermore, there was also an issue with the backups not saving correctly which didn't give me peace of mind that if something went wrong while I tried to fix the issues, I would have been able to restore the website. So it made more sense to rebuild the website from scratch on my development server using Joomla, a CMS that I prefer for its core built-in structure that relies less on external plugins. Without the support of a backup system, rebuilding the website on another server would have allowed the website continue running until we were ready to switch.

Once I accessed the website dashboard, I discovered that both WordPress and most of its extensions and plugins were running outdated versions. Furthermore, the backup system wasn't saving correctly, which raised concerns about restoring the website if something went wrong while fixing these issues. This made rebuilding the website from scratch on my development server a better option, using Joomla - a CMS I prefer for its core built-in structure that relies less on external plugins. Building the new site on another server would allow the current website to continue running until we were ready to switch, which was especially important without a reliable backup system in place.

Due to the nature of the business, the client needed a website that relied heavily on photos and user-friendly navigation for potential clients to see their services and photo galleries of past events. With a clean template and very few plugins, the new Joomla website was ready to launch after a couple of weeks. Once the website was populated with updated content, I fixed the issues with the missing meta tags, while rebuilding the website on a new and updated system resolved the scripts that were causing loading and speed issues with the web pages.

During the mockup development, I ended up rebuidig the logo to create a few color variations instead of using the initially provided as a JPEG. Once I had the logo vectorized and ready to use for other projects outside the website, I created a mug to send to the client as an idea for a branded marketing item.

Working for Houston Selfie Co. was a good opportunity to help a client with issues created by neglecting WordPress updates and maintenance. Offering comprehensive services allows me to think ahead about efficiently using files, such as the logo and photos, at their highest resolution for both digital and printed products without losing quality or wasting time, which greatly affects present and future production costs.