FES was in trouble. Their website hadn’t been updated in years, nor had their server’s PHP. Their site’s host’s server had pushed updates to their software that rendered the FES site completely obsolete…or in other words, it went down. All they had was an export of the core files off the server from the host.

They contacted me to see if I could help. I said YES! I was excited for a challenge that I hadn’t come across. Here’s what happened:

First I had to figure out how to get the site up, at least to see the content. I was lucky that I had a media folder with images. I needed to create a virtual space on my server that ran the outdated PHP, where I was able to load the site and get screen shots. Then I rebuilt the site using my preferred WP theme, using almost exactly the same layout.

One thing the old site didn’t do, that we wanted the new site to do, was to be mobile responsive. One issue here was that several of the images had the text on them in the image. This is not dynamic, and obviously will not adjust to varying screen sizes. So we needed to track down some of the original images without the text, then add text as dynamic overlays.

In the end, the new site build was a success. FES-us.com is now dynamic, mobile responsive, expandable for future build-outs, and is receiving monthly updates on the backend to keep up-to-date!