Tony Castro from Sportsboat World contacted me looking for help with moving his existing website from a hosting company in Portugal to the UK. He also needed to update some content on his website and was unsure how to go about this.
The first job was to transfer the domain name from the website designers and into an account in Tony’s name. Whilst this was going on I gained access to the hosting and downloaded a copy of the website to test locally before transferring to some UK hosting.
Generally it’s a pretty easy task to transfer websites – but this one took a long time to finally get working on my hosting. The main problem was that the website had been happily running on outdated servers, but once I put it on some modern hosting it just didn’t want to work.
Eventually I managed to get into the website, and had a look around. I’ve been using WordPress now for more than a decade, so I can generally find the settings I need – but this site was so damn complicated, an incredibly complex theme, numerous plugins, one being an outdated version of a page builder which meant every time I tried to edit some text I got a error and the complete site went down.
It never ceases to amaze me that you can have two WordPress websites that look so similar – but once logged in, be so completely different; one a pleasure to use, the other a nightmare.
Regrettably I had to tell Tony that his website was unlikely to work on modern hosting, and that his best bet was to create a new site importing all of the content from the old one.
Tony agreed to a new website as long as it looked pretty close to the original one, so I set about creating a new website, simplifying wherever possible and making things clearer.
Throughout the old site there were plenty of things to improve. The main navigation was almost impossible to see most of the time, so a simple gradient and blurring of the background image improves this. There were also lots of nice images, but mostly hidden behind coloured blocks – and when you hovered over them they appeared to be links – but didn’t actually link to anything!
On his old website Tony had to ask the designers to make any changes to his website, but of course on the new one he can login anytime and make changes. I sent him some simple tasks and he was soon setting prices and adjusting text.
The website is built using a custom child theme of WordPress’s default Twenty Twenty Three theme, with some additional style options for default blocks.
Tony is very happy with the new website and I look forward to helping him again soon.