The new Landlord Law – the reality

Well, further to my previous post, Landlord Law has now gone live.  Its basically, good but there have been a few problems.

Landlord Law! Where is it?

The first thing was the massive delay in seeing it.  We switched the namesevers over early on Wednesday, and lots of  people started logging in and using the new site.  However I didn’t see it until Thursday morning!  I got an email from one member on Friday saying that he was still seeing the old site!

Still as it is now a week since we switched, I would hope that everyone now is being directed to the right place.

Most of the site is working perfectly, and fully bears out my web designer’s choice of Drupal.  People have also been very complementary about the fabulous design (all down to Gill) and many also say the navigation is easier.

There are just two problems.  I suppose it is only to be expected with an import of data between two totally different systems, but there have been problems with the members access.

The members access problem

Some members can get in fine.  However many appear to be blocked.  Others, although their details are there, have lost their membership status.  These are all quite easily dealt with by me, but it takes time.  I have to check their membership records on the old site and then make sure that what they have on the new site corresponds.  And I have to unblock their membership when it has been blocked.

Sometimes when I do this, the member gets a once only login link email sent out by the site, and sometimes they don’t.  I haven’t quite worked out what triggers this yet.

A couple of days after launch I sent out a newsflash telling everyone we were now live, and asking them to check their login.

Pandemonium!

Loads of people emailed in saying that they were locked out and I had a very busy time sorting them.  I am still getting quite a few every day and I expect this to go on for some time.  Still at least once I have sorted things out ’round the back’ they are able to log in all right and use the site.  Well most of it.

The document generator problem

The document generator has quite frankly been a nightmare.  As I discussed in my last post.  However what I did not tell you there, was that we had to launch before it was completely finished.

When you generate a document (by filling in fields which I have set up and then clicking the button at the bottom) you get taken to a My Documents area.  This is where you download it.  There you see a list of all the documents you have generated with the most recent at the top.  There are then three buttons, view (just to look at it), pdf (to load it as a pdf) and delete.

There was supposed to be a fourth button.  This was edit, and it was supposed to take you back to the form filling bit, if you found you had made a mistake, so you could do it again.

However shortly before launch I found that this was not working.  I didn’t want to hold up launch any longer (as it was already about five months overdue) so we decided to go ahead without it.  HOPEFULLY the software designer Joop will be getting this done asap after Christmas.

However obviously people do make mistakes, and want to go back and change things. Not having the edit button, I suppose they are using the back button.  Just guessing but I strongly suspect that this is the reason why so many people are emailing me saying that they are getting locked out of their My Documents area and are unable to load their documents.

So I am having to calm them down about that and, if they really can’t get it to work, send them one of the pdfs from the old site.

Site offline!

Then this morning, I went to check a link and found it was not loading.  Horrors! Then I checked a few more links, and found that the WHOLE SITE was not loading.  EEurgh!

My first panic thought was that it was something with the software, and that the whole site would be lost just after launch, and we would have to go back to the old one, while we rebuilt it.  However no, thankfully that was not the problem.  It was a server error.

But this is where the value of using a posh server company like UK Fast comes in.  They have engineers there 24/7 and within about half an hour of my reporting the incident to them they had sorted it.  AND later they sent me an incident report saying exactly what had happened.  Which I never got from my old hosting company.

Still I rather hope it never happens again,

Heigh ho!  But apart from these things (and the member and doc generator problems will no doubt be sorted in time) it is a great site and I am really pleased with it.

Have you had a look at it yet?  You will find it >> here.