This project entailed taking over maintenance of a very active e-commerce site for an arboretum in Flagstaff, Arizona. The site handles a truly impressive volume of event ticket sales.
The site software had not been updated in nearly a year, exposing it to many potential security issues. The original site builders warned that updating could break the site, though, and the Arboretum feared having to spend a lot of money to fix things if something went wrong. Additionally, much of the content was out-of-date.
Our first step was to strike a copy of the site on one of our dedicated servers. There, we brought all software components up-to-date and tested thoroughly before duplicating the same changes on the live site.
Next followed an extensive round of content updates. We were especially proud of replacing a convoluted series of “opening hours” wordings with a simple seasonal table, using hand-coded responsive html/css.
Finally, we were asked to take over hosting and maintenance, and permanently moved the site to one of our servers. There, our patented “belt, suspenders, and parachute” backups allowed us to enable automatic updates, with the assurance that if an update were to break something, we could easily restore the site to a working version and manually resolve any issues preventing forward migration.
The Arboretum staff have been a delight to work with, and I hope to make it down to Flagstaff at some point to check the place out it person. From the website, it looks very nice!