My tiny company has had a web site for some time. As neither I nor my colleagues knew bugger-all about building and maintaining a web site, we hired someone we knew to do it for us. He did, it was fine… but the work relationship soured, so he is no longer in the picture re: site maintenance. Has not been, for some time now. We all are ridiculously busy, but as the default tech support person here I thought I’d try to take on the task of updating the site and some of the behind-the-scenes functions (like employee-only access to certain types of info).
Some generalized ranting about my experiences follows:
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Thank you, my dear colleague, for naming yourself as the web site manager and changing the administrative access password without telling me, and then forgetting altogether that you’d actually done it. Thank God I found your little handwritten note on a copy of the original confirmation email from the web host.
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I guess it also didn’t occur to you that the catch-all email address had to be checked from time to time, or at least set up to be forwarded? I just checked the inbox for the default (which has the same password as the site administrator, btw)… there was a boatload of spam in there dating back to April that had been chewing up a major portion of our allotted disk space. No wonder we have been having problems getting mail into our individual accounts lately.
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On a related note - folks, when the person you are trying to reach is the company president, and he has his own little page prominently featuring his personal email address, what possesses you to send an urgent email to admin@?
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Why in hell is the site administrator help menu so poorly written that I can’t tell what some of the options will actually do? And why is something that ought to be simple (like limiting a “public” login to ftp access only) so damned difficult to set up?
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Why are nearly half the features promised by my web host inaccessible or apparently no longer extant (e.g. web site stats, webmail access)?
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I just love the spam filter function. Sure, I have all the time in the world to add each domain name I want blocked by hand.
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Why can’t I login to the account manager portion of the site with the site administrator password, or my own? WTF does “time for instant registration to account manager has passed” mean??
Of course, since it is Sunday no one is available at the web host to field any questions regarding the admin functions. So much for my plan to get things taken care of before the madness of the week begins. Grrrrr…
