Check Everything You Do
Posted On: 2009-08-17
And so the packing and preparations to move house continue. By this time next week the removalists will be here and we can then look forward to the fun of getting unpacked and back online in the new house. The house we're moving to is now empty so later today Steve or I will head round to check on the phone lines and some other important issues we need to be sure about.
Of course we could leave it all till the day we move, after all we've been told that what we need is there in the house, but we've been caught before so this time we're going to check and make sure for ourselves. It's really very important that we're able to walk in and plug straight into the phone lines and have a high-speed Internet connection because Steve most of his work from home so it needs to be functioning the day after we move.
As I said, in the past we've been caught and after one move we were left without a high-speed Internet connection because someone at our phone company didn't check to see that he was making the right switches from our old address to the new one. That really did cost us quite a bit of lost production time and it was frustrating trying to get someone at the phone company to actually fix the problem.
Checking our work is something that every one of us needs to do continually. If you're a beginner that little piece of advice is doubly important because it's so easy to add the wrong code to an affiliate link so that we don't get paid for our sales, forget to upload images so that the only person who sees them is ourselves or insert the wrong links into the navigation on our pages so that no one can see anything other than the index page.
Even those of us who have been around for years need to check the work we do and that can be something we overlook because we're over-confident and forget that it's so easy to make mistakes with work that we've done hundreds of times before.
Recently Steve was doing some SEO work for a new client on a site that had been around for several years and had been designed by one of the big web design businesses here in town. To his amazement he found the most important link on the index page actually linked back to the index page rather than pointing to where it was supposed to point. That link had been like that for as long as the site had been around and no one had ever noticed.
Even if you use fancy scripts to handle various aspects of your web design or site management you still need to check to make sure that the script is functioning as it should. A couple of weeks ago another client had us do some work on a fairly new adult paysite and to do that work we needed access to the members' area.
That was no hassle, we got the access ok but when we got into the members' area there was no content visible. A couple of emails later and the client was sorting out the mess that his content management system had created. Just when it had started displaying no content is anyone's guess because the client had taken one look in the members' area after the system was installed and then never went back to check again.
Unfortunately his problems weren't over when he fixed the system and it began displaying content once more because that just revealed another and perhaps far more serious problem that involved things that even members should never see.
Just about every content management system these days will do a pretty good job of resizing images and adding thumbnails .... unlike some years ago when paysite content usually had to be resized by hand or you had to run them through a batch process to get them resized and thumbnailed .... and our client's content management system was one that resized images.
So without checking he had simply tipped all the images in each set he purchased into the script and left it to do it's thing and apparently never went back to check on the finished product. What he ended up with in several galleries were landscape images that were resized and posted as portraits and portrait images that were resized and posted as landscapes.
He also ended up with something far more serious and that was some very private images of some of the models. You see, many photographers take photos of a model's driver's license as part of the 2257 process and at least one of the image suppliers for the site we were working on had done just that.
Instead of removing those license images from the image file before the site owner tipped them into the content management system he had left them there and so members' were able to see the model's driver's license which clearly gave her real name and full address.
Yep, you really do have to check everything you do and leave nothing to chance. Some day someone's life may depend on you taking a little care with what you're doing.