Even though hurricane season officially started on June 1, for some reason things don’t start rocking and rolling here in Virginia until September through to October. As I write this, wind and rain from Tropical Storm Hanna has already moved in and is going to make for a pretty unpleasant day.

Hopefully Hanna won’t cause us too much trouble, and thankfully Hurricane Gustav didn’t turn out to be the disaster we feared in the Gulf earlier this week. But hurricane season isn’t over until the end of November. And right behind Gustav and Hanna is Hurricane Ike and Josephine…it’s going to be a long three months.

Emergencies don’t have to be as large scale as a hurricane to cause you trouble in your life, your business, and your website…sometimes something as simple as a sudden illness, a computer crash, or problems with your web host can cut you off from your website. If you use your website to gather leads and to sell your work, long periods in which you can’t access your website or check your email means that orders can pile up, potential leads can get lost. Which is why it’s important to make every effort to stay connected in an emergency. Here are a couple tips that can help you:

Make preparations beforehand- If there is anything good about hurricanes, it’s the fact that you can see them coming and you can prepare for them. If you know that you may be disconnected from your website and your business for a period of time, prepare for it in advance. Post a notice on your website and/or blog explaining the situation. If you have an email list, notify your subscribers and customers beforehand. Then use your vacation settings on your email to automatically reply to people who are trying to contact you via email.

Keep people updated as much as possible- The thing that makes people anxious is when they don’t hear from you. If you can, create alternative ways to keep your customers updated on what’s going on. Using Twitter is a great way to do this. The Red Cross has been doing a great job of using Twitter and other web tools for disaster response. As long as you have access to a cell phone, you can send tweets via text message or through voices messages if you have a Jott account. Plus you can hook your Twitter account to your Facebook or Myspace account, your website or blog so you can post updates without having to access any of those sites.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter or Jott, you can check out my past posts on both:

• How to stay organized with Jott
• Blogging with Jott
• Adventures in Twittering
• Adventures in Twittering: Update
• An Artist’s Guide to Twitter
• Changes to the Jott Service

Designate an “in case of emergency” person- Some emergencies like a sudden illness or accident will leave you unable to contact your customers through your website, blog, or email. To prepare for events like this, you should appoint someone you trust as a sort of “in case of emergency” person. Your emergency person can be someone you trust, such as a family member, friend, or an assistant who can send out emails and notices and post to your website and/or blog on your behalf.

When you choose your emergency person, train them on how to access your blog, your website, and your email. If part of their duties includes keeping the ecommerce side of your website going, you’ll need to train them on how to fill orders and update your web store. Write these procedures down along with instructions, usernames, and passwords down so that your emergency person will have something to refer to. Be sure to keep this information in a safe place…and tell your emergency person where to find it.

Backup, backup, and backup some more- Do you back your website and blog up regularly? How about the rest of your important files like your customer lists, product inventory, and sales records. If you don’t you need to start now and continue to do so. Why? What would happen if your computer crashed? Would you be able to access your customer list? What if something happened to your web host or the service running your blog? Would you be able to switch to a new service or host if you don’t have a copy of your files ready to go?

Make it a regular practice to backup your website, blog, and computer files. Burn your files to a rewriteable CD or DVD or to a portable hard drive and store them in a safe place, preferably away from your studio or home office. You can also use an online backup service like Mozy, Carbonite, or iDrive, but you should also keep an offline backup on DVDs or on a hard drive in case you can’t access the web. You should also tell your emergency person where your backups are and how to access them.

So now it’s your turn! How do you keep in contact with your customers during emergencies? Leave a comment and let us know!

Last Friday, I posted the first video in my critique of my current jewelry website Mixed Media Designs.com.

Here’s the second video in the makeover series. In this video, I visit my blog and point out more improvements that must be made.

RSS Users click here.

A couple of days ago, my hosting service went down and The Crafted Webmaster was unavailable all evening. Because I also have a couple of my other websites hosted on the same service that meant that those sites were down as well. While outages like this can be frustrating, in most cases they’re not all that serious, and if your web host is reliable, these incidences are rare. My hosting service kept everyone updated as to what the problem was and they managed to get things back up and running as soon as possible.

But what if your hosting service seems to have problems like this all the time? You should start getting worried if:

• Your hosting service goes down more than a couple times a month
• You’re consistently having a hard time reaching anyone in tech support
• Tech support fails to respond to questions or problems within 24 hours
• You start noticing some of the same complaints from other customers in the tech support message boards.
• Problems with your website are due to changes or limitations with your hosting service (it’s possible that your website just outgrows the abilities of your current host)

So what to do? Well in some cases, the problems are just temporary and they’ll even out. In other cases, it may be time to find a new web host. If you do find that you need to get a new web host, here are some tips that can make the transition easier.

• Make a backup of your website as soon as possible. This includes all of your web pages, graphics, and any software installations like Wordpress blogs, shopping carts and any databases that goes with them. If your web host uses cPanel for website administration, this is pretty easy. If you don’t know how, get someone to help you. (and once you’re settled on your new host, make it a practice to back up your site regularly)
• Take your time looking for a new web host. Don’t rush this because you’re frustrated or angry because you don’t want to leave one bad host only to sign up with another bad one.
• Get some recommendations. If you know of someone else who has a website, ask them who they use. Chances are if they’ve been with their host for a year or more the host is pretty reliable.
• If you got your domain name at the same place where you’re hosting your site, seriously consider transferring it to another registrar before you move your website, like My Namespot or any of the other domain registrars out there.
• Don’t prepay for hosting…at least not for the first couple months. A lot of hosting services gives discounts if you pay 3 months, 6 months or even for the entire year up front. While it’s tempting to save money by getting a yearly contract, I usually recommend that you pay month to month at the beginning. That way if the service starts to head south, you’re only obligated for a month. Once the service has proven itself, you can try switching payment plans if you wish.
• Don’t cut off your old host until everything is up and running at your new host and the DNS for your domain name has been changed properly. Remember that changing the nameserver or DNS information for your domain name take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to be universal across the Internet. So keep that in mind when you’re switching to your web host. If you don’t know what DNS is or how to change it, check out the video below.

RSS Viewers Click Here to watch video

It seems like I run into this problem at least once every couple of months. I’m asked to help someone with their website, perhaps something went wrong on the site…maybe someone got fed up with their web host and the want me to help move them to a new host. “Okay” I’ll say, “Great! What’s your hosting account information?”
“Uh….I don’t know. Do we need it?”

“Um…yeah.”

If you’ve registered a domain name or if you’ve opened up a hosting account for your website, soon after your account is set up, you’ll get several emails from your hosting company or registrar. DON’T THROW THESE AWAY! These emails contains important info that you need in order to help maintain your website.

If you’ve registered a new domain name, you’ll get an email that contains the following:

• The username and password for your account
• Your account number

If you ever need to transfer your domain name from one registrar to another, or if you ever change hosting companies, or if you change email addresses, you’ll need the user name and password to your domain registrar account in order to make these changes. (In case you don’t know, a registrar is a company where you can get a domain name; popular registrars include Godaddy and Network Solutions)

Domain registrars have gotten very strict about making sure that you’re the owner of the domain name before they allow you to make any changes. There have been a number of cases of fraud in which people essentially steals a domain by pretending to be the owner. So if you lose your account information, be prepared to spend some time on the telephone with tech support trying to prove who you are.

When you sign up for hosting, you’ll be emailed some important email as well. This info includes:

• The username and password for your account
• DNS information (so you can point your domain name to your hosting account)
• Instructions on how to set up your hosting account

Again, expect to spend some time on the phone with tech support if you lose track of this info.

When you get these emails, save them in a separate folder and you might want to print them out and file them with your other important records so you don’t have to go digging through your emails to find this information.

Also, if you happen to change the email you used to open the domain or hosting account, be sure to update this information with your hosting company or registrar. Sending emails to the email account on file is one way these companies verify your identity. If you happen to close the email account that’s tied to your domain or hosting…you could be in a world of trouble.

Yesterday I received an email message from a visitor to my Crafting Voices podcast site. Apparently, the phone number I provided in one of my pages is not working properly…the extension was somehow deactivated….oops.

It was a quick fix, but it’s a fix that I should have been able to catch myself had I been more careful about testing. And of course, it may have been broken for a while without my knowing.

Ironically, I wrote a blog post yesterday about making sure that everything is working properly on your site. Well, the same thing goes for your offline contact points (snail mail, fax numbers, and phone numbers). If you provide a phone or fax number, make sure that it’s the right number and make sure that it works. If you’re only available during certain times during the day, list those times on your site and try to make sure that you’re actually available or provide a message explaining how to further contact you. If you have voice mail, make sure your message is up to date and contains all the right info. There’s nothing like listening to a voice mail greeting that wishes you happy holidays in the middle of July. If your fax number, phone number, or postal address changes, make sure that change is reflected on your site.

So, while you’re running down your periodic test of things on your web site, take some time out to make sure that phone number and voice mail works like it’s supposed to, and if you have a fax machine, send yourself a fax to make that still works as well.