For the client it is a great way to get online for a low initial cost.  It allows them to concentrate on their branding and not have to create pages of content.

A great example of this is the new Capital Renovation site.   TayloeGray built this site for a friend’s new company,  a Raleigh North Carolina Home and Commercial Renovations company.  We also made a single page site for Prissies.com where we used Paypal and the clients image for a boutique sock manufacture.

I have a client who has outgrown Godaddy’s hosting and I am moving them over to MediaTemple, who provides scalable hosting for high traffic and database intensive websites.

The site is made up of four open source web based applications:

1. Wordpress for content management
2. OpenX for banner advertisement serving
3. phpBB for web forums
4. Gallery2 for a photo gallery

Each of these applications has a separate file structure and an individual database on Godaddy.  Much of the content has been uploaded to the application and the easiest way to move the site would be to Zip or Tar the entire site, backup the databases and move the files over to the new hosting.  I have probably done this thirty times in my life.  It is pretty straight forward and most of the time is spent watching files transfer.

Godaddy has made this impossible for the following reasons.

1. They do not allow you to create Zip or Tar archives larger than 20 mb with their “file manager” tool
2. You can not run Tar or Zip from the command line without enabling SSH access, which requires that you delete all your databases for some reason.  I have seen some restrictions on SSH access before, but nothing like this.  One of my favorite host, BlueHost, requires that you provide a scan of your driver’s license before they enable it.  MediaTemple, makes you login to a webpage to enable it.  Godaddy gets a strike against them for their stupid requirement.

I tried to archive the entire site for about an hour and tried various fixes I found on google, such as phpshell, cron,  shell script.  To be fair, I did not try this approach, How to backup Godaddy, but it looked like it had the same limitations as the other.  After all that, I gave up and decided to just FTP the whole mess to my new server.   I logged into Mediatemple via SSH and connect via FTP to Godaddy via the FTP command from the command line.

Connected to websitename.com.
220———- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [privsep] [TLS] ———-
220-You are user number 6 of 50 allowed.
220-Local time is now 09:25. Server port: 21.
220-This is a private system – No anonymous login
220 You will be disconnected after 3 minutes of inactivity.
Name (websitename.com:andrew):

The command mget (for multiple get) kept timing out and I never could get very far into the process.  Nothing is worse then getting part of the directory structure or missing files.  It will take weeks to track down missing includes and recreate the mess that missing files would result in.

With direct FTP access a failure I started to loose hope, but after a bit of googling I found a solution with my old standby wget.

Wget is a, according to their website, “a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.” It can be installed on most OS X, Linux and Windows.

Normally, I use it to make a backup copy of a website because it can spider through a website and download all the files, images and other pieces.  It also can turn a website with .ASP or .PHP files into an HTML website, by renaming the files and updating the links.  Overall wget is a bad-ass tool and can do a lot to save time and fix problems.  I had never however used it to FTP from a flaky ftp site.

Here is how I did it:

From the command line of the Media Temple site I rand the following command: (obviously, you need to use your FTP username and password)

wget -rv -nc –timeout=15 –random-wait ftp://*username*:*password*@websitename.com

Here is how it breaks down,

• -r is to recursivly download all files
• -v is to give verbose feedback, so I can see what is going on
• -nc is to “No Clobber” or do not redownload files if the command is restarted
• –random-wait is to keep the Godaddy server guessing in case they have some sort of automated script to block this sort of this
• –timeout is to set the timeout to 15 seconds.  By default the timeout is set to 900 seconds on a read of a file.  By setting this low, it will give up quickly and try again.

BAM, the files are all downloading and starting to show up on in my MediaTemple site.

The next step is to go get some lunch while it all downloads, then backup the databases and move those files.  Then all I have to do is set up the domain on Media Temple and move over the files.  Moving the files via command line is as simple as “mv oldfiles/* newlocation/” This is certainly easier than the hurdles that Godaddy set up for me.

Half way though the process, I did get an error for

“421 Too many connections (2) from this IP” but I let is sit for a while and reran the command and everything was fine.

All I have  to say is *%$()*) Goddady, I want the last four hours of my life back.

One of my clients, who shall remain nameless, used a free HTML WYSIWYG editor to make edits to the text of their website.  This editor created a block of text that was improperly wrapped in <MAP> HTML tags.  A MAP tag defines a client-side image-map,  an image with clickable regions.  As a result the text was hidden from the browser.

After a little more than a week, they received this message via email from Google. ( the url has been changed)

Dear site owner or webmaster of ********.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from ********.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

* The following hidden text on ********.com:

It then went on to display the text in question.

As a result they were dropped from the organic search results on Google.  This was particullly bad because it was over the weekend prior to the start of national television campaign.  The owner gave me a call on late on Sunday night and we started working on a plan.

1. We immediatly removed the offending text from the site
2. We requested reindexing from Google via the Google Webmaster’s Tools
3. We set up a new Adwords campaign using just the domain name and company name as keywords, that pointed to the home page.

Lucky for them, Google was handling request quickly and they must have seen that it was an honest mistake, because the site popped back up on the top of the search engines within 48 hours of the request.

To keep this from happening to you, do the following.

1. Design your site using standard practices and don’t try and trick Google.
2. Follow Google’s Guidelines.
3. Never hide text on your site by using any of the following techniques or any other method.
   1. Match the text color and background color
   2. Use CSS to set the display to “None” or the placement off the page
   3. Position the text behind images or other element
   4. Wrap the text in non-display tags.
4. Make sure to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and monitor your account for errors.
5. Validate your web page using the W3.org tool to ensure your HTML is correctly formatted.

Remember, Google has more engineers working on Search Quality and more Ph.Ds in information retrivial working for them, than you do.

“In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.”

This is an exhaustive survey of who makes websites, including Project Managers, Webmasters, Developers and Creative Directors .

Some interesting results:

• 72.5% have their own blog.
• 46.5% had a field of study unrelated to current web work.
• 32.2% have only been in their current job 1 year or less.
• Project Managers had the highest job satisfaction (51.6%), Webmasters, lowest (40.3%)

View results here http://www.alistapart.com/articles/2007surveyresults