We got a rushed email from one of our Marketing Partners that does Google Adwords on some very specific networks and channels. The problem was that a client’s site was not responding well to their recent advertising campaign. One of the problems was obvious, the slider was not loading correctly and was pushing all the content down the page to “under the fold” so a user quickly clicking onto their website would not see what they did. It also showed the missing image icon and it looked like a mess, which would, of course, reflect poorly on the business itself.
The owner had hired a developer a few years ago and they had done a nice job of designing the site, but then the owner changed the name of the business. When the add-on domain was done and the site copied and moved into the new directory and updated to reflect the new name, a few things had not been done, including making sure the slider images that had been hard coded into the slider plugin, got moved into the proper directory and had the correct path.
Luckily that was quickly fixed, we found the name of the images from Chrome Developer tools, and went hunting in the original backup before the move. There they were in the original wordpress image directory, (even though they were not in the copy ) and we got them copied and moved into the new directory and updated the slider plugin. With the correct slider images the rest of the content moved up into it’s correct position and everything was back on track. In this particular case, the images were done with a particular 2013-2014 style with a lot of Photoshop tweaks that would have been a disappointing to lose. Thank goodness the old site copy was still available.
But the most important thing that was not done when the site was moved and updated, was to make sure the contact form was updated as well. When the form was completed and submitted, the page result went to a 404. When we were hired to do the fixes, we quickly found out the reason for this was that the original developer was using WuFoo Forms and they were the only ones that had access to the account. The developer was long gone, the client had no idea about this at all and didn’t even know where to look to get access, if they ever had it to begin with. So we could try WuFoo again, and duplicate the css and other settings, but the issue with WuFoo is that if you don’t purchase the monthly subscription, and instead use the free account, your forms will have advertising that the user will see. In our opinion, it depletes branding strength for the website and business, and it looks a bit “cheesy”.
We opted for installing Contact Form 7, but of course, there was one more thing in front of this. The site had not been updated for a long time, almost over a year since the site was moved. ( We shudder to think how long the contact form issue had been going on.) So to be on the safe-safe side, we backed up the site, then moved a copy to a test server and then did the update, and then updated all the plugins, installed Contact Form 7, then spent some time playing with the css to match what had been done before. The dominant form had been in a sidebar and had a specific look with a background image repeat that made it look a bit like shiny metal, ( to a nice affect – not overdone at all.), special spacing, a specific image header and a few other items. Once done, we saved our new form, our new widget, our new css and tested everything. Once fine, we went to the real site and repeated all of it, but of course, since we had done the test first, the real deal took only 30 minutes or less.
Mission Accomplished, the client and partner was notified. We understand that their campaign is on track now.
