NetON Melbourne

Tag: EXA Liquidation

  • EXA Liquidation – What now for your website?

    EXA Liquidation – What now for your website?

    Impacts of EXA Liquidation

    Ever since news broke down yesterday about EXA Liquidation, the web has been buzzing with questions about what a company should do if they are in the situation and how they can protect themselves moving forward.

    We put a quick checklist yesterday on what you need to do immediately if you are a client of EXA, please click on the link below to view it. In the page there is information on how to make sure your website, your domain and your emails get minimally impacted by EXA’s liquidation or if you have an issue with your Digital Agency and you would like to change Agencies.
    http://www.neton.com.au/2016/02/checklist-for-moving-agencies/

    How to future proof yourself

    EXA Liquidation - what does it mean for you

    While EXA liquidation came out of nowhere and is a very isolated incident, these things happen all the time in a smaller level. Sometimes you have to part ways with your Digital Agency and sometimes it becomes a sore affair. We at NetON have moved a number of clients to ours after a falling out with their Digital Agency. Most of the time, the previous agency is helpful but every now and then they are not and it’s harder to get all the assets to rebuild the site quickly.

    So the second question is how to future proof yourself for the future. Here are some tips to make sure that you can react quickly if this happens again in the future.

    1. Keep a backup of all your assets

    This gets thrown around a lot but doesn’t get implemented much. As a company you use a lot of imagery, videos etc on your site. Making sure that you have a copy of all the images locally means that you can rebuild a site really fast.

    2. Make sure your provider has off site backup of your site

    This is a very crucial step. Ensuring that you provider has a off site backup means that you can rebuild the site from the backup if there is a crisis. For example, with EXA Liquidation, most of the site information is in their servers which are now pretty much locked.

    3. Use Open Source where possible

    Try and use Open source platforms for your websites. WordPress and Drupal are great CMS’s that you can use and in case you need to find another agency, it will be easier to find an agency who can work with Open Source platforms.

    4. Don’t get locked into proprietary CMS platforms

    Same point as above but worth mentioning, don’t use a proprietary CMS that only your Digital Agency can work with. This never ends well in our experience.

    5. Manage your own domain

    This is a no brainer but time and time again, we see clients letting their agency register the domain. Registering a domain is easy, gives you more control and is way cheaper.  Manage it.

    6. Use Google Apps or Office 365 for emails

    Again another no-brainer, please use an email provider that is not your Digital Agency for your emails. This way changing providers is not a pain.

    7. Use an Agency that doesn’t try to lock you in

    Try and use a Digital Agency that doesn’t try and lock you into hefty contracts. If you are not an enterprise, boutique agencies work just as well as a high profile agency. They will be faster, cheaper and more attentive to your needs.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Checklist for Moving Agencies

    Checklist for Moving Agencies

    Has your current Digital Agency gone into Liquidation? What to do next.

    Ever since EXA went into liquidation this morning, companies in Australia have to now cater for this unlikely event with their websites. What happens if your Web Design Agency goes into Liquidation?

    looking-in-the-dark

    When a company goes into liquidation in Australia, the company is effectively closed and the assets liquidated. If you have your site hosted with a company which has gone into liquidation, this essentially means that your site will close down at some point. Usually data centers are paid for in a month in advance so you are likely to have your site for until the end of the month.

    Here is a quick step by step checklist to make sure you can move properly to a new agency.

    Scrape your current website

    Since your agency is liquidated, you may not be able to get a hold of the staff. It might be impossible to get access to your files, so you need to scrape the static content of the sites.  Usually this is a technical thing to do, so best to assign this to an IT person or a digital agency. 

    Get admin access to the site backend or access to the files

    Get in touch with your account manager/producer ASAP and try to get access to the backend or access to the files. Were there any past backups? Do you have access to them? Past backups or backend access works best to recover your website.

    Get access to domain

    This is also a crucial step, if your current agency registered your domain name, you need access to that ASAP. Reach out to your Account Manager for access to domain. We at NetON prefer our clients handle domains themselves for this reason.  If you can’t reach out to any of the staff, you can also reach out to the registrar (eg CrazyDomains, NetRegistry, Melbourne IT) to get access to your domain name.

    Back up your emails

    If your emails are hosted with your current agency, you need to backup your emails ASAP. If your emails are hosted with Office 365 or Google Apps, then you don’t need to do this step.

    Get a new Agency to setup your website

    Get whatever asset you have (static scraped website) or access to files, get another agency to setup your website on a new host. This will mean that you are safe from the site going down.