New theme of 2016

In late February of 2016, I had been having some challenges with my website acting wonky. Several times it went “down”  This meant no one was able to book appointments on my school website www.barefootbushcraft.com, or read my adventure journal at www.wolfmaan.com (and variant sites).

This was extremely frustrating. I got a message from my host server and was advised that I was being forced to change something called DNS servers. This meant both of my websites would be down for about 5 days as the host provider was very slow.

As expected, this led to clients calling asking why both websites were down, I lost bookings at Barefoot Bushcraft. It was a big mess.

Frustrated with this behaviour from my web hosting provider, I sent a polite email asking for monetary compensation from them. A grand total of $13.95 which was the equivalent to a single months web hosting. I had been with my web hosting provider for almost 10 years. The provider I chose was Canadian, so I could help assist our local economy. I received this email in response:

Apparently a decade old client asking for $13.95 compensation for loosing business was too much to ask, and I was advised to take my business elsewhere. They must be a very wealthy company that they can afford to ask customers not to give them money each month.

Quickly, and happily I chose a new web hosting provider and migrated over a decade of website entries to my new server. The school website was fairly new and transferred almost automatically. Sadly, my original travel and adventure website was running an incredibly old version of WordPress and fought tooth-and-nail to be transferred. In the end, I realised the issue was with the WordPress theme I was using on the website was very outdated and not compatible with the modern servers. Here is a screenshot of my website which I had using this theme from 2011 until March of 2016.

My new website as of March 2016 still runs on WordPress, but is an updated platform. The challenges with this was that many of the new features such as “featured image” and other such things did not exist in 2011. This meant spending almost two weeks editing each and every one of the 300+ posts that I had created over the past decade. Each post needed a new image which represented the post. These were painstakingly created with Gimp. After that, the website itself had to be built and widgets and custom colours installed. It was a huge undertaking.

I adored my previous website colours, design, and theme. However the world has changed, and alas, we must change with it. Below is a screenshot as of March 31st, 2016 when the new website was installed. The website still needs some small tweaks which will be done over the next few months.

The up-side is my new hosting provide is also Canadian, and one of the largest hosting providers in the country. This means everything is in one spot. Domain names, hosting control panel, everything. The price was also 1/2 price my previous hosting provider. This means I have unlimited bandwidth, storage space, registration of a free domain name, and more for only $6.00 a month. It ended up that the best thing my previous web hosting provider could have done was tell me to go somewhere else.

I took my hippie dollars elsewhere, re-designed my website, and live moves on.

Thank you for reading!