About The Client
MGL Media are a successful video production company based in Leicester. They have an impressive client list of local and national companies including:
- Leicester City Football Club
- Everards Brewery
- BBC
- Channel 4
- HSBC
The Website Rescue Mission Story
One Saturday morning back in July, Matt Holt owner of MGL Media, came to me with a website crisis. Their site had terminally broken and their existing web person was unable to revive it. This is exactly the kind of website rescue mission challenge that really spikes my interest.
They urgently needed a holding page back up and running on their domain: mglmedia.tv and from there we could look at a full site rebuild. Given the visual nature of their business, they needed an online presence that could really show off their work.
All this was pretty straightforward, but the cherry in the chapstick would be to save 10 years of WordPress blog posts from their dead website.
The Process
First order of priority was to get the holding page up and running. We had this ready within a few hours of officially kicking off the MGL Website Rescue Mission project.
Matt and Wayne already had a clear idea of how the site would be structured and the wanted their videos to be at the core of the re-design. They had a theme in mind so starting on a framework rebuild was underway pretty quickly. From a build point of view, this meant we could get a framework site up and running in no time.
The next item on the list: retrieve the historic posts from the MGL Blog.
Breathing Life Back into the MGL Blog
The original site was built in WordPress and, ordinarily, it would be a fairly simple process to create an export from one site, then import it into another. But this only works if you have a living breathing site to export from.
As it stood, there was no live site to generate an export file. Luckily we were able to retrieve the database table from the original site. Without this, or some sort of export, there would be no hope at all of migrating the content across to the new site.
With tenacious determination over several hours, and some wild air guitar celebrations at the finale, we managed to successfully map all their blog posts, images, tags, and categories onto the database tables for the new website.
And it’s a great read with some fantastic insights in to video marketing. Two of my favourites from their recent posts are:
Check out the full MGL Blog on their website.
Do You Have a Website in Need of Rescue
No matter what the issues you’re facing, we can take a look and see if there is any way to salvage your site. It really could be possible to bring a dead website back to life. Give us a call or fill in our contact form and we can talk through your options.
