As I write this in May 2020 we are in the middle of the Covid 19 pandemic with the lockdown restrictions still in place. Not a great time to be a freelancer! When the Punk Scholars Network asked me to build their new website a couple of weeks back the timing couldn’t have been better. Huge thanks to them for commissioning me to do the work.
As always the first thing to do is to look at the existing website and see if I can pull content from there and get an idea of the structure of the site. I clicked over to the existing site to discover it had been hacked! A nasty hack too as the website was redirecting users to different suspicious web pages that were either spam or worse. The punk scholars hadn’t realised the site was hacked so it must have happened not long before I looked at the site. The old site was built on Wordpress.org and hosted on a UK hosting service. I did a bit of searching about that kind of hack and the pages it was redirecting to and it turned out to be the work of Russian hackers! I found quite a few forum posts from people with the same problem asking for help and what to do. The hack had infected the Wordpess database as well as a whole load of files and plug ins. So no easy fix. I found a company that could fix that particular hack but the cost was around £200. Better then to delete the site, cancel that hosting and start again.
I set up the new site in Squarespace and got to work. The Punk Scholars team were brilliant at sending me copy and images. I asked them to bombard me with content and they did and that meant I could complete the site in two weeks.
A really interesting part of creating the site was creating an online shop for their merchandise. I learned so much from doing that. Creating the product listings, working out the best shipping options and hooking up to PayPal. It works great too. The first t-shirt was sold within hours of the site launch. Has their ever been a more important time to have your products available for sale online?!
The web site is a must visit if you are a student/academic/researcher of music and the music industries or just a fan of the punk movement. Brilliant book listings and you can grab a bit of merch while you are there.
Some great feedback from Matt about my work:
“After our original website was hacked, the very thought of having to rebuild the site without any detailed knowledge of website retrieval, design and build, it seemed a very daunting prospect. Working with Steve on the new Punk Scholars Network website was one of the least stressful experiences we, as an organisation, have had. His insightful suggestions enabled a complete new build of the website and in doing so gave us the ability to make it really dynamic and purposeful. Steve’s methodical approach and experienced advice allowed us to have all the different elements of the new website we wanted, with a smooth and simple interface . He kept us regularly updated on progress by producing walk through videos showing us what had been created and how it all worked. Steve was also very accommodating in setting up a web shop for us, which was quite complicated in what we wanted it to do, but he did all the upfront research for us and did a fantastic job in creating it. We are very pleased that we used Steve and his experience to give us the website that we have wanted for years but didn’t have the time or experience to deliver. We would highly recommend Steve and his services for a professional stress free experience.”
Written and published by
Steve Hogg