This post is for one simple purpose – to say a HUGE THANK YOU to Colin Receveur, of Smart Box Web Marketing, for his amazing customer service and help, and to try and repay him at least a little for his “beyond-the-call-of-duty” assistance.
WordPress Websites are Easy; Plugins Can Cause Problems
I have been using self-hosted WordPress for both Dental Digital Photography and my Charlotte NC dentist office website, SmilesbyPayet.com. For the most part, it’s a very easy platform to install, learn, and use, and that’s why I recommend it. It doesn’t hurt that the platform itself is FREE, most plugins are free, and you can host it for less than $10/month in several places.
However, there are times when something can go wrong, and when you’re in control of your own websites, that means you also have to fix them……if you know how. With a little experience, Google, and all the support available around the Web, this usually isn’t a problem. This week, however, I ran into a problem that caused me some real headaches. I don’t know exactly how or when it happened, but something went wrong on my dental office website, which is really bad, because that’s how we get most of our new patients every month. The entire website wasn’t broken, but it looked like this:
Looking at the main content section in the middle, it’s obvious something was screwing up the fonts and formatting, and it looked WEIRD! And while I knew how to check for some problems, none of the ones that I knew worked! PANIC TIME! LOL But fortunately, not really — I knew there were some people on DentalTown.com who could probably help, if they were available, so I started a new thread there asking for assistance, and Colin Receveur answered – thank goodness!
Trouble-shooting WordPress
Basically, Colin offered for me to call him up, and he’d see if he could help. Given how important this was, I called immediately – at 8pm in the evening! Colin and I then spent the better part of NINETY MINUTES (90) on speakerphone and using Join.me to screenshare, while we (mostly HE, I just helped check how things looked on my end) went through the website, looking for errors. The culprit seemed to be a plugin, but we had a lot of difficulty narrowing it down to which one or ones it was. Thankfully, however, Colin knows WordPress pretty darn well, and he eventually isolated a single line of code that referenced a Stylesheet for the Shareaholic social sharing plugin, which was apparently the problem! WOW!
Expert WordPress Help for Dentists
Without going into all the technical details (many of which were over my head anyway), Colin fixed my website. Even more amazingly, he didn’t charge me for it, which is crazy, but apparently that’s the kind of guy he is. Being the kind of guy that I am, though, there is no way I can let that go without SOME attempt to thank/repay him for his generosity, knowledge, and assistance – hence this post. 🙂
If you are looking for someone to build a new website for your dental office, I personally recommend Colin. Given how much I already know, it is clear to me that he knows his stuff, and I am confident that you will be pleased with his work. If you do hire him, please come back and let me know your experience in the comments!
Colin just sold me a QR code with instructions to print and give my patients in order to generate Google Reviews for me as a Dentist. The logic is absolutely bunk. It’s a QR code which is read by Smart-phones and tablets. Google has made it so you can not leave reviews on Smart-phones or tablets via your Google Local Page. So the whole product and concept is a complete waste and has been for months. How can someone so smart sell something so stupid. I don’t think he intended to SCAM, its just stupid.
Chris, that is very odd, and I’m sorry to hear about your experience. I’ll check with Colin personally; however, are you SURE you can’t leave a review on a Google+ page with a mobile device? I seem to recall leaving a review for a great sushi place with my iPhone, but it’s been a few weeks; I’ll have to try again.
15 seconds is definitely too long. I am sure you’ve seen the dentaltown thread where page load times are discussed relative to Google’s algorithms. I am off to read that again. Glad your site is back up and running.
It’s not usually that long, but sometimes …… still, ANY times it takes that long is too many!
Chip,
I saw your post on dentaltown about this issue this morning. I am glad you got it resolved. You’re right about WordPress. We dentists can master 99.9% of WordPress 99.9% of the time. But there is that .1% lurking out there. I will keep Colin’s name in the back of my mind in case something like that ever happens to me.
I think a key lesson is to never upgrade/install more than one item at a time. When you do, it makes it much more difficult to identify the problem.
Good post.
Nicholas, indeed, it was a very big relief to get that fixed, especially as I was heading out of town the next day for a weekend in the mountains, where we had pretty much zero internet connection, so it would have been stuck that way for several more days, and we truly depend on the website for new patients. I am thinking of moving my hosting to Colin’s service, as there are some page load speed problems that I’m having with my current host. While page load times are not thought to be a big part of Google’s ranking algorithms, Google has said that page load times is part of it, and there are times my site can take up to 15 seconds to load. In today’s Internet, no one will wait that long.