2 minutes reading time (460 words)

The High Cost of Staying Old

The High Cost of Staying Old

I had a client who refused to pay to have his site migrated to Joomla 3. I argued with him, offered him deals and discounts, and still he did not see the business sense of spending money to "migrate".  His attitude was one of resentment that upgrading was now migration and all the mumbo-jumbo that went with it was just not anything he understood or even wanted to understand. He did not see the difference and the new functions didn't seem to sell him.

This forced me as a business person to really examine what I was asking of my clients who are basically ignorant of all the changes that go on in the Joomla world. How could I get into his head so he could see the worthiness of migration? Are websites in general not perceived to be in the same technical world as new versions of Windows or iPhones or wireless connections of televisions for example? Will there always be those hangers-on of corded phones and Windows xp? Will it take a governmental mandate similar to the US's FCC in 2000 for digital tv transmission to get people to migrate?

Then his site got hacked. We restored it from a good backup but had to strip out all the 3rd party stuff which made the site pretty much informational with no fun. A cheap fix - couple hundred bucks. Then it got hacked again another couple hundred bucks and this time the host finger pointing ran full gear about whose fault it was and built to a verbal war between the host and my client and  now he wanted me to rebuild the same site on a different host. Well, that was the coup d'état for me...there was no host that was going to take an old version no matter whose fault the hack was or who was willing to fix it.

I’m recalling this because last year in the Joomla Update Group there was a discussion of getting hosts involved in the migration push by providing them a letter to send to Joomla customers designed to encourage those stubborn clients into migrating. We were not sure hosts would be willing take such an aggressive stand so the idea got dropped.

All this is unfortunate in so many ways but in other ways it's making me realize that as a web developer I can’t always control my clients. There are always going to be those clients that are going to lose or change their sites based on greater forces rather than my advice.  Then our best intentions will be left behind and our business will be to sit back and watch the train crash and be as supportive as we can in the midst of the ensuing results.

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