Category Archives: Blog

Whoops… emailed borked in early Jan.

AusClicks, Blog

Looks like our switch to the new website wasn’t as smooth as it seemed.

Part of the switch involved using a new setup for email and instead using NetRegistry for our email hosting. The initial testing was fine, but when we switched the new site on, the whole DNS / parking / mishmash got mixed up and basically our email was mostly broken for about 3 weeks.

I say “mostly broken” because it was one of those wonderful IT problems where it works OK for you, but broken for others. We were getting some messages, but obviously not others. That combined with the quiet Xmas period and we didn’t really notice the lack of emails arriving.

That and waiting for baby #2 to arrive kept me more than enough distracted to not think about email much.

But one of our clients alerted us to the problem last week and the guys from NetRegistry were great in fixing things asap. To keep things interesting I somehow twisted my back on Wednesday morning so I’ve been in bed the last 5 days recovering and not been able to do any work.

All better this morning – my back and email.

Ironic that we are trying this new setup to avoid email hosting problems from the past. But the idea is solid and if anything, this mistake has actually led to a better way of doing things again.

Unfortunately if you sent any email either directly or via our new contact form from January 1 to about January 18 – we didn’t get it. I’ve tried recovering things this morning – but seems it’s lost. I will be trying to manually contact a few people we know we missed communicating with over the last couple of weeks, but obviously we will miss others that tried and didn’t realise our problems. It’ll take a day or three to catch up completely I expect.

Cheers.

Michael.

Finally… our new site is ready.

AusClicks, Blog

Finally… Hello World.

After almost 2 years since we switched from trading as Mildura Internet to AusClicks – the AusClicks site is ready. Well as much as we can for the moment.

Actually this is the 3rd AusClicks site I’ve written in that time. The first one was a very quick couple of pages thrown together to simply have something on the ausclicks.com.au domain. Although there had been plans to change trading names and redirect the business, it was all rushed together within a week or so to coincide with Michael’s visit to the Internet Show in Melbourne in 2010. That trip changed our business so much we quickly became so busy we didn’t get a chance to revisit the site for another six months.

In late 2010 I started working on a new site, got about 3/4 of it done. Looked fantastic, very happy with the direction it was going. Then the developer of the theme I was working with disappeared off the planet, the new version of the software I was using was undergoing a massive (and needed) upgrade that would break old themes and projects, and then in Xmas of 2010 while on a weeks holiday in Adelaide, we picked up about 10 new clients. Doubling our new client tally for the year. So it was crazy busy, the developer went awol, and it could all be broken and unusable within 6 months. Backburner for the new site.

In 2011 we had several more trips to Adelaide for our daughters cerebral palsy diagnosis and operations, a wedding in Hobart (got caught by the ash cloud), we relocated to Dubbo which didn’t go terribly smoothly, I personally had 3 bouts of flu that put me in bed for the best part of a week each time, plus Fiona and Eliza also ended up in hospital with the flu for about 5 days each. Oh and we got pregnant again. And somewhere in there I kept up with existing work as best as possible. Not a lot of time for working on the site.

Towards the end of 2011 I started working on the WordPress platform again. Something I had dabbled with years ago but WordPress 3.x is a very powerful version. After doing a couple of client sites in WordPress, I decided to switch most of my own development to WordPress including my own business site.

So over November and December 2011, and into January 2012, I’ve finally had the chance to put together a decent site for AusClicks. Even this has been through 2-3 variations. The current incarnation reflects my goals of wanting a nice looking site for desktop / laptop computer – but also looks great on tablets and smartphones. Well OK – it has to look awesome on my iPad and iPhone. This “responsive design” has been great to work with. Little tweaks that I never would have thought of bothering with before make all the difference to an iPhone user.

There is still lots to do – new font engine to fine tune, checking links, price list plugin to install, Google+ etc. Lots of these things have to wait until I switch the site from our test domain to parking it on AusClicks.com.au. One of the clever things about WordPress 3.x is it’s easy Multi-User / Networking feature which lets me have one installation of WordPress, and run unlimited sites and domains off it. Sounds a bit confusing? It means I only have to update and maintain one site for the backend, not dozens / hundreds.

Once all the new stuff has been installed and tested, there is loads of content I want to get online. I’ve been holding off on Tweeting too much, posting much on Facebook, putting together our business blog and newsletter, all until the new site was ready to roll.

We have lots of new friends in our new home of Dubbo to show off too. Now with a site I am proud off, I’ll be making a bit more noise around town.

Please subscribe to our blog and Newsletter. 2012 should be a lot of fun and I have lots to share which will help your business online and offline.

Oh, and our other new baby should be here soon too. 39 weeks tomorrow!