Project Type: technology rebuild
Industry: construction / contracting
When the site's hosting company reached out to Coast Essential in regards to an alleged "malware issue", they were given a couple of days to address the issue or the site would be taken down. Links to purchase a security package was included at a cost of $300.00/yr., with a "partner" company. I ran five separate malware scanning solutions to find the source of the issue, but they all came up clean. This raised suspicions of questionable tactics to get more money: "purchase this bundle or we'll take the site down."
Additionally, there was a real issue with the site. The security was at risk because the theme software had not been brought up to date for more than 3 years. I made complete file system and database reinforcements, and then upgraded the theme and plugin software. The pages went blank and left the header and footer. I then understood why the software had not been upgraded. The original designers favored Advanced Custom Fields to the page developer software that came bundled with the theme. To integrate ACF, they had made substantial alterations to the theme's core files and included quite a few format files of their own. This made it impossible to update the software, because any updates would overwrite all the original code hacks.
An efficient remedy to the hosting company's requests was to move the site briefly to my developer hosting space. (No malware issues came up there!) Although the majority of the content had been restored, we could not do much more if the theme software was not updated. It would not have been logical to re-code the theme, just so Advanced Custom Fields could be utilized going forward. We had to do a quick rebuild that would essentially enable all future software updates to be completed with no further issues.
The client was pleased with the existing look and feel of the current site, which had tracking updates to its code to incorporate BuilderTrend. The most practical approach would be a quick rebuild of all the layouts and pages, in the Visual Composer page builder that came with the theme, rather than ACF.
To conclude, this was a technology modification, not a redesign. The site looks the very same, even though the core software has been completely replaced, and every page layout had to be recreated.
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