Just wanted to write a quick post to remind you all that you must be diligent when getting anyone to do any web designs for you. I’ve been leading a search marketing campaign for Thames Leisure, a company that specialises in boat cruises and rentals in London. They recently got their developer to make their site mobile-friendly.

This was certainly achieved, and was much-needed. The site now looks great on mobile and they will hopefully be able to get lots more sales through mobile users. However, although they had done lots of testing on the mobile version of the site, nothing was done on the desktop version and I have been constantly finding changes that have been made. Some of the things that changed were:

1. there was a cached version of the site still showing up for some users which meant that the new design was not appearing correctly
2. all of the page titles and preset meta descriptions had disappeared. This was a major problem for our SEO campaign as all the work we had done on creating tailor-made page titles and meta descriptions had completely vanished from the site
3. when work began on the mobile version of the site a back-up of the database was made and used for the testing. When the mobile version was ready this version was then uploaded. This is bad practice. All the work we’d done on the site between these two points was lost which meant we had to re-upload posts that had been completely deleted from the system. Why they had to do this is beyond me.

They were the major takeaways so far. All I can say is: please be careful when doing any updates and make sure you test the site, and I mean all parts of the site, thoroughly after making any changes, and especially after making extensive changes like upgrading to a mobile-friendly version of a web site.