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!