As an adult webmaster I've been aware of the potential risks, liabilities, and environmental dangers we face due to the type of content we work with and promote. Disasters seem to be looming just one court case or a new Visa regulation away. Being an adult webmaster in Florida, I've been faced to deal with not only the political disasters that hit Palm Beach in the 2000 election, not to mention the numerous tropical storms that have been pillaging this beloved state.
It is one thing to protect your business' tangible assets when preparing for potential disasters, whether you can see them coming or not. Backing up data, uploading to servers in remote locations away from your affected area, or even purchasing power backups and generators to keep not only the lights on, but the business flowing. But what about the disasters that come that do not affect your tangible assets but your intellectual property and efforts put forth towards gaining the success it takes to drive business in the first place? Preparing for a marketing disaster requires a contingency plan just like a natural or physical disaster, and emergency reactions can limit the length of the term of any damage resulting. In this article we will review a few potential causes that can precipitate a disaster and how to plan to prepare and react to them.
Website Disasters
When an online business' website goes down you might as well hang a 'Closed' sign on your doors. There is no excuse these days why your site should go down unless an entire internet backbone provider goes down. Therefore it is wise to invest in a web host which provides redundancy, or which mirrors your website from either multiple locations or provides an alternative network if the primary facility fails. It is also a good idea to burn back ups of your website monthly if, in fact, your web hosting provider shuts down, discontinues your service, or "loses" your website due to DNS or IP assignment failures.
Domain Disasters
Losing your domain can happen faster than you may realize these days, with so many marketers and companies capitalizing on Expired Domains for residual traffic. Make sure to check and log when your domain name expires and be sure to stick with a verifiable registry. Ideally, you should trademark your domain name so that if it is taken from under you, you can have rights to buy it back or sue any competing business who tries to capitalize on it. Likewise, it is smart to check to see if any new domain name you register infringes on existing trademarked names in part or in whole. Often this is why registering a .net or other when the .com is taken is not recommended.
Design Disasters
After forking over a ton of effort yourself or a ton of money to a professional for a web site design, it is important to make sure you back up on a CD or other media the PSD files used to create and customize your design. This can help you use alternative designers when needed, make changes on your own for new button names or graphics, even allow you to upgrade and update your own designs for your needs. God forbid you do lose your entire website for some reason, by having the PSD you can easily re-slice the images and convert them into tables using Photoshop and ImageReady.
Programming Disasters
Programming is a fairly expensive investment and it is often overlooked that databases and scripts need maintenance and updates. The first reason many updates are needed is to increase security and add upgrades to the functionality of your scripts. Databases often need to be compressed and/or analyzed every so often to make sure they are running efficiently. Too much load and too little space can seize an SQL database and losing all this information can be the most expensive element to losing a web site. So talk to your programmer and find out how technologies like Zend, maintenance scripts, periodic backups, and other services and solutions can help secure the integrity of your business if a failure was ever to occur.
FTP Disasters
There's nothing worse than a "accidentally" overwriting your web pages. It's a good idea to rename any main files with a date extension like "Filename_9-04.html". This way you can archive changes on the server or download them to your archives before deleting unused or old files off the server. You never know when a fatal coding error can cause your site to go down, especially if you use advanced programming languages, so having an original on hand that is ready to be implemented never hurts.
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SEO Disasters
Finally we have SEO disasters - mostly which result in a loss in search engine ranking. These can happen for a number of reasons:
Web site down time - Engines attempt to spider your site and returns a URL not found. Concerns should be raised when downtime exceeds 48 hours.
Web site redesign - Rankings can be lost when a replacement design goes up with all new page names replacing old pages (old pages still indexed in the engines return a 404 or old site) and/or when a new design goes up that does not carry the same optimization factors, content, and elements used to achieve original rankings.
Too much submitting/auto submitting - Sometimes less IS more. Sites can drop out of engines if they are submitted too often. As a rule of thumb, check to see if your site is listed before submitting. If it is, then only submit new pages or link the new pages in with your site and the spider will index any new links or content changes the next visit or two.
Redirection - Page redirection, cloaking, or auto-forcing windows to open or pages to load lower your page relevance in the search engines. Use alternative means to get visitors where they need to be such as by using Frame sets, iframes, or walk through pages.
Of course, some disasters are unavoidable and having a business online runs the same number of risks as being offline. Fortunately, there is much we can do in our infrastructure to keep things up and running as we avoid one catastrophe at a time. One thing 9/11 taught us is, is if you can imagine it, it can happen. Sometimes the most creative measures can combat the most adverse circumstances we as webmasters will face. For now, all we can do is exercise control over the things we can, and accept and avoid those things we cannot control. Until next time, keep you and yours well and happy promoting!