Mairead Ryan Travels
“As a technophobe who likes to write pieces about my travels, Elliot was a great help in retrieving all my pieces lost when my domain name was put up for auction. He helped me to negotiate the wonders of technology with expertise and patience.
I am now more determined to get my site out there and make contact with others who are interested in travel and culture, in the knowledge that I have someone I can rely on when I get into technical difficulties. I would highly recommend Elliot as I think he is very committed to what he does. He provided a very personal service, which is such a rarity these days, and his fees are fair.”
WordPress Rescue and Rebuild
Sometimes a website is lost. Sometimes there isn’t even a backup to restore. That was the situation Mairead came to me with.
She had previously had a WordPress website where she published pieces about her travels and her interest in different cultures. But the domain had long since been lost and was up for auction. The original WordPress website was gone. She didn’t have the website files, and there was no backup.
Years of writing looked as though they had disappeared with it. Fortunately, I knew where to look.
I was able to find an archived version of the old website and recover Mairead’s articles, giving us the material we needed to start rebuilding her website.
Project Summary
The first task was to establish whether a copy of the old website had been preserved by the Wayback Machine. Its archives go back to 1996, allowing users to go “back in time” and see how catalogued websites looked in the past.
Archived websites are not always complete. Pages, images and other elements can be broken or missing, but fortunately a partial copy of Mairead’s old website had survived.
Once I had found it, the next phase was to recover as much of the content as possible. This meant manually copying the articles into a master document so that the writing could be preserved and prepared for the new website.
It was a slow process — involving hundreds of individual transfers in this case — but well worth the investment of time. By the end of it, we had recovered a substantial amount of writing that had previously appeared to be lost.
The Build Itself
An archived website cannot simply be brought back to life as a modern website. By its very nature, it is an old copy, and website technology moves at a rapid pace, often making the software and techniques originally used obsolete.
In some ways, this presented an opportunity. Rather than trying to recreate an outdated WordPress website, I could build a new one using modern technology while retaining the structure, navigation and blog topics that had worked for Mairead in the past.
The next stage involved preparing the recovered content for import into the new website. This required some database work, but once everything was structured correctly, the blog history could be imported in one go.
After a short training session, Mairead was able to work her way through the new site herself, updating articles where necessary and adding images that had been missing from the archived version.
The finished website gave Mairead a modern and secure home for her writing, with the flexibility to continue adding to her archive and engaging with readers. It was also hosted on the Business Think hosting server, providing additional protection against hacking and future data loss.
This was an unusual project with some unique challenges, which made it particularly rewarding. Most importantly, years of Mairead’s writing were once again accessible rather than being left behind in a broken web archive.
There was also an unexpected pleasure in the project: while rebuilding the site, I had the opportunity to read Mairead’s fascinating stories about the people, cultures and places she had encountered along the way.
This article was written by Elliot Forte, founder and Director of Business Think, a business strategist, digital marketing specialist, and educator with over 25 years’ experience supporting thousands of organisations to grow and adapt in an evolving marketplace. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are based on his professional experience working with businesses across a wide range of sectors.
If you would like to work with Elliot, explore collaboration opportunities, or discuss how he can support your business growth, please get in touch.