Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:09 pm

We have, or I should say had, an client (a local hotel) that used us to build a website and then carry out SEO on the site for them.  I say “had” as they contacted us recently and told us that they were going to move the site to a 3rd party who would build the site, host it, SEO it and also carry out all sorts of marketing for them as they were specialists in hotel marketing.  Of course we wished them luck with the new site and was contacted by the new firm who arranged for us to transfer the domain to them.

One or two problems then arose, it seems that the new host decided to change the DNS settings on the Easter weekend and some how managed to stop emails from working, they then decided to reset the email server details so that it pointed to our servers (we run emails via a cluster so that client’s emails stand a much better chance of arriving).  That, it seems didn’t work so the settings were changed back to the new hosts server with the comment “it must be something at the clients end that is causing the problem”.  Now remember that this was done over a bank holiday week-end that in the authors experience is a busy one for hotels and you can see that this could be a problem if people were enquiring about possible bookings and their emails were not being answered.  As we hadn’t closed the hosting account on our server (we had only been told about the 3rd party a couple of days before) we were at least able to log in to the mail server as the client and forward the emails that our server had received on to the client for them in an attempt to minimise the damage (fortunately the email from the new host was picked up on Good Friday as we checked emails rather than leaving it until the Tuesday morning after the bank holiday).

The second problem, and this could sound like sour grapes, is that we had been carrying out SEO for the hotel that had resulted in them getting very good positions on both highly targeted and more generic phrases relating to hotels and restaurants in the area of North Wales that we are based in (specifically North Wales, the Conwy Valley, Snowdonia and many of the towns in this area.  Imagine our amazement when we looked at the new site to see what it looked like, to see that the site consisted of a single page that contained almost no wording and a “Our website is under development” comment at the top of the page.  That meant that months of work had just “gone down the pan” as the next time the search engines visited there would be no content for any of the phrases that had been targeted in the past which is a shame as the number of enquiries being received by the hotel was going up, the traffic was going up and looking at the types of visitors, the site was attracting people who were looking to holiday in the area.

The next problem and one that the new firm should have been aware of if they kept up to date with SEO announcements relates to content “above the fold”, as this blog post by Google says sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” have recently (since January 2012) been likely to be penalised for making visitors scroll down the page to get to the real content.  Yes, you’ve probably guessed, the new site took up almost the whole page on a lap top with scrolling images (the old site also had a slide-show but the images took up a lot less space on the screen) and the only way to get to the content was via a “show more” link which many people would ignore.

While we don’t wish the hotel any harm, and remain friends with the owners, we wish that they had mentioned to us that they were going to move and we could have at least pointed them in the right direction over the latest SEO requirements,  the best way to move a website and how to minimise the damage when redesigning a website.

If you are a website designer, host or even a website owner I’d be interested to hear of any bad (or good) experiences you have had when moving or redesigning a website.