Web development woes.

January 20, 2006 8:16 PM

A client's website keeps losing its changes.

I put together a small (6 pages),simple site for a client. HTML based, No flash, or bells and whistles, and created with Dreamweaver. Nothing I haven't done for dozens of other small clients.

The reason for the simplicity of the site is that the client wanted to eventually be able to change the text (via Frontpage) of some pages occaisionally. No big whoop.

The site has ben hosted on godaddy for about 6 months now. Only in the last month or so have they started to make changes (prior to that, they would send me the changes to make).

I explained to them that they should edit the local files (on their computer) and then replace them on the server and they seemed to understand it.

The problem is that the changes they are making appear on the site for anywhere from 6 hours to a couple of days, then the site reverts back to the way it was prior to them making the change.

I dont know if it is reverting when they are updating via frontpage or when its just sitting there by itself.

I dont think it is godaddy because I have about a dozen or so others who use godaddy with no problems, and I was updating their site just fine for 5 months.

I think the problem lies somewhere in their use of Frontpage. Because I'm a Dreamweaver user, I just dont know enough about FP to offer a recommendation. Heck I dont even know if FP is the problem.

Anyone have any thoughts?

posted by sandra_s to computers & internet (6 comments total)

You might be on the right track with your hunch about frontpage. I've not used it in years, maybe even nearly a decade at this point, and my only tinkering was out of necessity to help a client.

Might I suggest you make some minor changes with Dreamweaver, save them to the server, ask them not to use frontpage for a few days, and see if the same problem occurs?

Or... you could FTP in and check the last modified date right after a change is made, then if the change vanishes, check that date again and see if it has changed... this should at least let you find out if the file has been updated, restored from an older one, or some other such crazy voodoo.
posted by twiggy at 8:29 PM on January 20, 2006

Though I'm not really familiar with FrontPage, I had a problem similar to what you are describing, only I was the one making the changes only to have them revert back. I'd get a call from one of my clients asking me to make a text change on their web site (one I didn't design), and then a few weeks after I'd made the change, they'd call me again and ask to make the same change. I thought I was going nuts.

That is until I logged into their FTP site and saw what happened was that someone in his office had access to their web site and was making changes without telling him. They had overwritten my work several times with files they had saved on their own computer.
posted by MegoSteve at 8:33 PM on January 20, 2006

Is it one user updating the site or several? If there are mutliple installations of Frontpage, I'd guess that somebody whose local copy of the site doesn't reflect changes made by others is doing some sort of site-wide update when they make changes, thus obliterating everyone else's previous changes.

The alternative is that GoDaddy has got some sort of automated backup system which has gone horribly wrong, but that seems less likely than good old-fashioned user error.

On preview: what MegoSteve said.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 8:34 PM on January 20, 2006

I have had this same thing happen to me. I took over a site that someone designed using Frontpage. I starting cleaning up the mess only to have the mess reappear. The problem stopped when the person stopped accessing the site with Frontpage. I don't know enough about Frontpage but it seems like it automatically checked for differences and overrode any changes that didn't speak that wonderful Frontpage language.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink at 8:45 PM on January 20, 2006

Sorry, Megosteve, I should have mentioned that as far as I know there are only 2 people who have access to the host, me and the client (who is a one-man-operation). I thought it might be a third party at first, but they assure me they did not give access to anyone else. And quite honestly, i dont think they would know how to share that info even if they wanted to. :-)
posted by sandra_s at 8:45 PM on January 20, 2006

I wrote a user's manual for FrontPage...albeit years ago, but I've stayed more or less on top of FP, just because I have legacy clients who use it.

The thing about FP is that it's insanely jealous of it's own code, in other words, if you ftp in and change stuff, rather than using the FP "publish" function...you can break the site, depending on how FP dependent the site is.

Also, the server has to be set up with FP extensions, or the "publish" function won't work.

That said, neither of those would cause anything to "revert" to a pre-change state.

The odds are it's user error, or a strange backup bug. I'd bet more towards user error...since godaddy is pretty reliable. What I would guess is happening is that they have multiple copies of the site...for instance, they're saving the site down to local every time they want to make an update, and have thus created multiple versions of the site in their My Webs folder. Then they are probably opening the wrong one, and publishing it back up. (The naming structures are not automatically intuitive.) That would be my guess as to the easiest way to overwrite the site with an earlier version.
posted by dejah420 at 7:15 PM on January 21, 2006