Don't forget to check your logs
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About 3 months ago an ecommercey website i developed went live. Of course, there were one or two hiccups along the way, which i fixed as soon as they appeared.
For the first 2 months, growth was very slow. In fact, there were no users registered in this time. I figured it was just one of those things - that it would take a bit of a while to gain popularity, or maybe it hadn't been indexed.A month ago i was going through the website's logs - each site has it's own logs - and noticed an error in my registration page. It was a bug i introduced just after most of my testing and going live. This bug prevented anyone from registering.
The moral of the story, check your logs and test any changes thoroughly! Since then the owner has had an average of 5 new users per day. Woops?
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I know how that felt. I developed end client application which has auto update feature. One time I updated the updater as I call that app and configuration files for it. It was really minor thing and for once didn't bother to test it as I should and of course I destroyed config for it, so next time update went out updatercould not find download URL etc. This faulty updater was online for only few minutes, but enough that our support received quite a few calls because of it. Luckily all they had to do was to start manual update and everything was fine.
Lesson learned.
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Was there no way for the users to inform you, or whoever was responsible for the website at the time, about it?
I'm sure people tried to register more than one time, just to be sure it wasn't their fault that it didn't work.
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Oops indeed. Did you tell the owner? :)
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One would expect that your client would try to sign up for his own website once up and running. Or that a relative, friend, business contact (w/e) of the owner would try to register. That is something weird in itself.
I really like your *growth was very slow* euphemism though ...
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@ince said:
Was there no way for the users to inform you, or whoever was responsible for the website at the time, about it?
When I find my way to some web store and it doesn't work immediately, I certainly don't waste time trying to contact anybody, I move on to the next google hit.
Whatever you're selling, there's ten more guys down the street who are selling it too.
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@DOA said:
Oops indeed. Did you tell the owner? :)
Nope! The owner was away for much of that time, so even if users could actually register, the ordering would not have gone through (there is a certain amount of manual processing intentionally required)
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@ince said:
Was there no way for the users to inform you, or whoever was responsible for the website at the time, about it?
Ha! That's funny. If it doesn't work the first time, not only will they not contact you about it but most likely they will completely forget about your site and develop that "customer relationship" with someone else.
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No users in 2 months? Possible - the product/site may suck.
No spammers signed up in 2 months? Heck, 2 days? You've got a broken forum.
