I recently picked up a client who had fired me a few years ago. I did a complete rebuild of his site, with all the usual back-and-forth for approvals of design, text, and so forth. Today, he gave me the go-ahead to upload it.
A few hours later, my client sent me an email telling me that the phone number on the site was wrong. His wife had noticed it. He'd missed it the whole time. Worse yet, he knew that it wasn't my mistake. It had been wrong on the old site (the one I was replacing), as well, but he'd never noticed it. I just lifted the number from the old site.
My client had confided to me during the rebuild process that from the day he'd fired me, he never got another job from the Web site. I'd attributed that to the fact that the site my replacement had built was horribly coded. It looked halfway pretty; but structurally, it was a mess. It was missing practically all of its required tags, the navigation menu was a nightmare, the URLs were not search friendly, there was no robots.txt file and no sitemap, and even the text was poorly done, from an SEO point of view.
As a result, you could barely find the site under its own domain name. That's why he wasn't getting any calls, I thought. And now we find out that the designer had put the wrong number on the site -- and it was wrong for all that time. No wonder he stopped getting calls.
I've corrected it, so he's good to go now. But I feel bad for him. He probably doesn't even have a legal leg to stand on because he approved the design, with the error, before it went live. Who knows how much business he lost.
-Rich
A few hours later, my client sent me an email telling me that the phone number on the site was wrong. His wife had noticed it. He'd missed it the whole time. Worse yet, he knew that it wasn't my mistake. It had been wrong on the old site (the one I was replacing), as well, but he'd never noticed it. I just lifted the number from the old site.
My client had confided to me during the rebuild process that from the day he'd fired me, he never got another job from the Web site. I'd attributed that to the fact that the site my replacement had built was horribly coded. It looked halfway pretty; but structurally, it was a mess. It was missing practically all of its required tags, the navigation menu was a nightmare, the URLs were not search friendly, there was no robots.txt file and no sitemap, and even the text was poorly done, from an SEO point of view.
As a result, you could barely find the site under its own domain name. That's why he wasn't getting any calls, I thought. And now we find out that the designer had put the wrong number on the site -- and it was wrong for all that time. No wonder he stopped getting calls.
I've corrected it, so he's good to go now. But I feel bad for him. He probably doesn't even have a legal leg to stand on because he approved the design, with the error, before it went live. Who knows how much business he lost.
-Rich
One of the things with car websites is they all us a separate 800 number to track and record the calls, so we have to dial the numbers to make sure they are coming to us! 
