Elaine Chukan Brown serves as the American Specialist for JancisRobinson.com, a contributing writer with Wine & Spirits Magazine and a columnist at Wine Business Monthly. Her work has been featured in World of Fine Wine, Decanter, Robb Report, MensHealth.com, GuildSomm.com, San Francisco Magazine, Alquimie and Noble Rot, among others.
That above is pulled from her site. Elaine is also SUPER gracious, kind, and in our interactions, a no muss, no fuss website owner. Her website is wakawakawinereviews.com.
IT Arsenal has been maintaining wakawaka as we’ve come to call it, for several years. Sprinkled in with her primary monthly service for updates and maintenance has been some initiatives like a payment gateway for some t-shirt sales, form setups, and most recently adding security to her site. However, at the same time, the site was compromised by a hack and in resolving the issue, forced a scenario of updating her website theme.
If you’ve never been caught in this double whammy of a scenario, it’s not fun. Elaine’s site was being hacked, then cleaned, then hacked again due to security holes in her old theme. At one point she had over 1000 randomly generated users on the site commenting. Not good.
Upgrading the site to a new/dramatically updated theme was a forced fix. It was overall good, as it’s good to keep your software updated, but also required decisions, downtime, website loading issues, and some ongoing tweaks to get it back to the way it was. Upgrading WordPress website themes is not difficult, but if you haven’t done it before, it knocks out things like your logo, menu, any customized fonts and colors. Resetting all those in an unplanned situation adds chaos and stress.
However, we recovered, and it was Elaine’s patience understanding that greatly helped getting the site back up to speed. We were both working at this impromptu stressful problem, noticing things and emailing often.
IT Arsenal is happy to report the site is now loading with an SSL which means it has that nice HTTPS lock in the browser bar, better SEO, it’s inherently more secure, and up to date!
It’s a pleasure to maintain and be the point person for Elaine and her business website goals. When I see her emails, I don’t huff and puff, but dig in knowing we have a solid partnership. Thanks Elaine!
