Website trouble?

If, like me, you are a small business owner, then no doubt you’ve encountered the odd glitch on your site. Unless you’re a tech enthusiast, the rest of just feel our spirits collapsing, don’t we? Our energy draining with every rasping, anxious breath.

This week I had no option but to just figure it out. I was in between web developers and my nifty little web app “Couturekit”, which lets you design your own wedding dress and is one of the most popular features on my site, just packed its bags and went into a sulk. “Fatal Error” sat in place of the beautiful image below.

In the past, my man-of-dreams, aka Mr Arthur, would have stoically trawled through whatever coding I’d inadvertently mucked up and tried to fix it. But it’s not his “real job” and I decided to take my own advice and just try. As per my previous blog, just to give it some attention.

So in I logged to my site, saw lots of red lights and scarey alerts, couldn’t find any solutions and resorted to googling “fatal error”. Low and behold, it mentioned a host, so I merrily logged into that account, having looked up who my host was, and fishing out my password from the depths of my memory, and after a few lengthy chats,  the problem revealed itself.

I could NEVER have fixed it myself, but I got stuck in, and in the process of not fixing it, I learnt all sorts of useful stuff on the way to a peaceful night’s sleep that night. Most of all, I learnt that the only way to become less terrified of tech is just to do it, and to do it often. So here I am – progress on the tech front, sourced by yours truly, and second blog of the year. Unprecedented output. Seeing as I’m publishing my first book this year, it really is about time to start writing to you regularly :).  Anyway…

In case you’re interested, the long and short of it is that some of the code on Couturekit didn’t seem to like having been upgraded to a higher version of PHP, which was unavoidable as the version I had was almost end of life. So my host reverted my PHP to a lower, inadequate version, which wasn’t ideal, but it was a quick temporary fix. I was advised I needed a web developer to fix the code.

I’ve now found myself a web ninja to do just that, and the message of this story is probably just to say that however bleak it seems when your website won’t play nicely, taking a breath is useful. It may not be as terrifying as you think.

Easy for me to say I suppose – I’ve got myself a web ninja now.

Welcome, Matt!