Business Roundup
Tue, 17 April, 2007 – 10:37 am
It's been a while I know. Life is exceptionally busy workwise and so when I'm not working I try and keep my distance from the computer. Even my spare laptop that I usually blog from hasn't really been on. So what have I been up to?
Well, with the company split at work I've been working on 5 websites simultaneously and, due to relying on others to supply the info and photos, have managed to get 4 live now over the course of just over 2 weeks. We still have at least 3 more to do, but they don't involve the COM programming that the others have so are more brochure style sites. I've also had more fun and games with the HSBC payment processor. After getting it to all work and telling the client to contact HSBC and ask them to test it and set it live, we got the all clear. However once it was set live it stopped working for me! I kept getting a 'Communication Failure' on the HSBC pages which was a concern. After informing my client I had a call from HSBC telling me that it was because I was using Firefox. Yes, HSBC doesn't support and doesn't fully work on Firefox and Opera browsers. Daft? I think so. I've now had to put up a statement on the site informing people that they can only use MS Internet Explorer - certainly not something I'd be impressed with as a buyer!!
Problems with payment processors continued last week with SECPay. Another client uses them, and her site is geared towards summer clothing for kids, so of course this time of the year is the start of the busy season, especially with the early sunny weather we've been experiencing here. Tuesday morning I had a call from her telling me customers were having problems. They were ordering and paying but not getting returned to the site, and unfortunately they need to get back to the checkout success page on osCommerce for their order to be processed (not a great method I know). She sent me a screen print of the error which was being displayed on the SECPay site. After a little investigation I couldn't find anything wrong with the site, I even ran my own test and it worked! So I informed her to contact SECPay support and ask them what was wrong as it had been working fine for 10 months and nothing had been altered on the server or the website. SECPay said they'd investigate and run some checks on their end. The next day, appropriately I wasn't at home (typical!) and SECPay called to say that they couldn't access the 'A' Record of the domain and that's why it was erroring. What on earth they do to need to access the A record is beyond me, however they forwarded an emailing explaining this and said it needed fixing before it would work for them again. Of course by now I'd already turned the credit card payment option off, my client stopped her AdWords advertising and was losing money fast. So after speaking to the host, we forwarded new nameservers to the client to get reset on her domain. It was a shot in the dark but the only option we had to fix this issue. However after a discussion with my client she agreed that perhaps it was time to move to Protx as she wanted to anyhow and wasn't impressed with SECPay's excuses. So no nameservers were reset and she started the process of signing up with Protx instead.
On Thursday I had a call from SECPay saying that everything was working again. How's that for the wrong answer?!! So to get this straight, nothing had been changed and after 10 months of no problems suddenly they had a problem accessing the A record of the domain, and 48 hours later they suddenly had it all working again, still nothing had been changed. Anyone smell a cover up?
On Friday I got all the info I needed to integrate Protx into my client's site, I started at 8am and by 4pm the site was live and accepting credit cards again. Gotta hand it to Protx considering the test to live step can take up to 24 hours. My client was getting orders again before the end of the day and very happy. Full marks to Protx, and I'll never be recommending SECPay again that's for sure.
You know this was meant to be a personal roundup but it's become all work talk! I'll do a personal one in a second.
So what else have we done? We've been working on integrating a new design into a very large old site of another client, my ex-boss. We've dumped my old table based layout almost, got valid code 99% through the site and tried to bring in as much accessibility as we can. It's a very busy site, 5000+ visitors a day, and the bandwidth usage is pretty high, so hopefully we'll knock this down a little. Of course they're on a dedicated server so it doesn't matter too much however speed is still of the essence. There's still a lot of work to be done on the site. It uses inline sessions for a start which I want to change to cookies. This would be pretty easy to do, it's just time consuming finding every instance of the inline session and removing it. It was my first large site that I built from scratch in PHP so I've also run through a lot more efficiency with it. Have to say I went include crazy with it and I've paid for that ever since, as finding a piece of code can mean going through several files before you can get it!
We've also got a new site on the go which luckily isn't too much coding and mainly brochure work. To keep the cost low we're using WordPress to power the site, handy for the news section too. However we need to add a couple of bits in which I've got to sit and play around with in WordPress first to see how we can set them up. Mainly password protected pages and what tricks or clever things we can do with them. At least I get to learn a little more whilst being paid for it 
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