Website redesign 2017

A new look and more speed for the site

I got my website renewed after a lot of effort in late 2015. The renewal was long overdue and successful in many ways. But something was left nagging at me after the previous renewal. Although the template's elements and other things were very pleasing to the eye, at least from my own point of view, the template had compatibility problems with some extensions. I could not solve these even though I tried.

The other problem with the old version was speed, or rather slowness. Simple Image Gallery Pro spiced up with the PhotoSwipe plugin made loading the pages sometimes agonizingly slow. But the loading of other pages also caused me trouble at times. Even though the page had already loaded, the preloader icon just kept spinning. I got the pages faster by tweaking over time, but I did not reach a good result.

Malware that sends spam nested itself on the site

So in autumn 2016 I started looking at a new template, but that was again a challenging operation. Since the site was built on top of the Joomla content management system, I did not see it as appropriate to change that to anything else. There are almost bottomless numbers of different templates online, so you would think finding a suitable one would be easy. But no. The majority of templates are somehow ugly or otherwise look worthless. In the course of the search, though, some templates started to feel like the most suitable options and they required a closer look.

My idea was to calmly look for a suitable template and set it up to work in peace and quiet, but things turned out differently. Through some vulnerability, malware had managed to nest itself on my website and began sending spam through the ilkansivu.net domain. At first I could not send email to Yahoo or Hotmail addresses because my domain had ended up on a blacklist. I contacted my service provider, Int2000.net. They did not see any abnormal activity anywhere.

Reporting-MTA: dns; cpanel1.int2000.net Action: failed Final-Recipient: rfc822;@yahoo.com Status: 5.0.0 Remote-MTA: dns; mx11.int2000.net Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 A URL in this email (ilkansivu . net) is listed on https://spamrl.com/. Please resolve and retry

A few weeks later I received delivery reports to my default email address about 31 failed email sendings. A couple of days later a couple more messages came. I wondered where this was coming from and, just in case, changed the passwords of all the mailboxes. I contacted the service provider, Int2000.net, again about the matter. They just told me to change the passwords of the emails and the main administrator to new ones. A few more delivery reports still came every couple of days, but about a week later it exploded. Then it flashed in my mind as well that this must be coming from my website.

We have not received any information that there would be harmful content on the site or that spam would have been sent through the site, due to which the address could have ended up on this list, but I nevertheless recommend checking the site space to make sure there is no harmful content there, and checking that the content management system, any extensions and themes are up to date, and updating these as necessary.Int2000.net

One day there were already 930 failed spam sendings, the next day 6636 and the day after that 4063. I was at work and could not take the site offline right away. Merely turning on maintenance mode would not have helped; the files simply had to be destroyed. I did not manage to remove the pages in time and Int2000.net's automation put my site into isolation. And not only my pages, but my email also stopped working after this. I could neither send nor receive mail. There was nothing to be done over the weekend, because the service provider's customer service is open only on weekdays.

I then sent an email to the service provider from Gmail, but those attempts also ended up in the spam filter at first. The ilkansivu.net domain was now on the blacklists so badly that the domain in question could not be mentioned by name. I just had to express the matter in a roundabout way so that the message would get through.

When Monday came I got in touch with customer service and got the site and the email opened. I restored an older backup of the website in the hope that it would not contain the malware. For a long time it looked like the malware disappeared as a result of this operation. But one day spam started going out again, and even more than before. Int2000.net saw the same when I inquired about it. They could not say anything else about it, so the pages had to be taken offline again. Perhaps a backdoor had been slipped onto the site at some point, so an even earlier backup would have had to be restored in order to get rid of the backdoor. But who knows how old a backup would have to be to have the backdoor in it. A proper hacker would figure it out, but I do not count myself as one.

How did the malware get onto my site? There are many routes. The most obvious option is a vulnerability in the content management system, in this case Joomla. Another route is a vulnerability in some Joomla extension. The site can also be accessed through the service provider, or through ftp, or by cracking the site administrator's password. That was left unresolved, but at least a couple of extra-looking files had appeared in the server's root directory. One spam message contained a link to one such file. An extra user had also appeared in Joomla, though according to the log that user had never logged in to the site. So this is probably the most likely option, a lead to the source of the mess.

Even though I had taken the pages offline, at some point spam started going out again. The spam malware had spread to a jAlbum image gallery outside the site, which was not even public. There was nothing to help but a total cleaning of the server of every possible piece of junk. After that no more spam went out. Int2000.net could have investigated the spam problem for a fee of 200€, but I did not take up the offer. I decided to rebuild the site from scratch. If there were 25284 failed spam deliveries, I wonder how many spam messages got through.

At the same time I decided to switch the web hosting services to another company. I had already considered this earlier, but it had been left undone. When you have read comments about some hosts, it would have just been a jump out of the frying pan into the fire. But Sigmatic started to seem good, both in terms of user comments and the service packages. So that is where the site moved.

All search results lead to Templatemonster

The site had to be got up quickly, so I had to get a new template in a hurry. Anyone who has searched for templates with Google has surely run into Templatemonster. They have large numbers of templates of all kinds for all kinds of content management systems. I had already considered buying a template called Wegy earlier, and now a sale was going on. I still asked in the chat whether the template is compatible with the K2 extension. The answer was yes. Templatemonster's chat is open 24/7, so help with questions is always available. And when you ask something about some template, a discount code comes to your email right away. That way you never have to pay the normal price for any template, as long as you just ask something about the product you want.

So the offer price for Wegy was 50 dollars, which is a reasonable price for a working template. The purchase, handled through Paypal, just did not go through right away and I was already starting to make the purchase again. At that moment the phone rang and the caller's area code was +1, meaning from the USA. The caller asked in English whether I had just bought a template. I answered yes and the call ended there. Right after that an order confirmation of the successful purchase arrived in my email and I could download Wegy to my computer.

Not everything went smoothly, however, and so far I have had a total of 13 tickets to Templatemonster's support system. Help with various problems has nevertheless been available either through the chat or through the ticket system, even during the Christmas holidays. Installing Wegy on a clean Joomla did not work. The result was just a pure white page with no content at all. The only trick was to install the quickstart package, which contained all the demo content. This is on the one hand an easy way, but I would still have preferred to start from a clean slate. I had, however, already installed the demo content in another place, where I could study the Templatemonster coder's brainwork. They tried to find a solution to the problem through the ticket system, but they also could not get a clean installation done. In the end they installed the full demo site, as they could not think of anything else.

In Joomla, various things can be done in a thousand different ways, and the ways used in different templates are not always explained very clearly in the documentation. Templatemonster's documentation is only a general version that fits any template, and the solutions used in Wegy specifically are not gone through in it.

Wegy had a bug that froze an iPad or iPhone when using Chrome, but this was fixed. Likewise, the AddThis share buttons I wanted settled into the desired place looking suitable. For some reason the Templatemonster advertisement at the bottom had been intended to stay in the template permanently, but with the help of support I got rid of that too. It is amazing that a paid template should have the maker's advertisement in it.

Old content into the new template

Wegy was supposed to be K2 compatible, but it turned out not to be. Because of the compatibility problems I was already wondering whether I would have to start looking for a new template after all. However, I was already so far along with Wegy that I did not want to stretch the renewal of the site any further, and settled for using Joomla's standard articles. The most important reason for using K2 is that I get very pleasant URLs, that is, page addresses. Because the old content had been made with K2, I would no longer be able to use the same addresses. For example, the address of the blog text about the Fuji X-Pro2 changed from the form: http://www.ilkansivu.net/blogi/fujifilm-x-pro2

to the form: http://www.ilkansivu.net/blogi/370-fujifilm-x-pro2

In the category view, the address of Joomla's standard articles always includes the article's id number, which makes the address look ugly. I thought, however, that I could live with this drawback, because Joomla's upcoming 3.7 update will apparently fix this problem. For the old addresses I made redirects to the new addresses in any case, so all the old links still work.

I set the old site running on my own computer with the help of a WAMP server, from where I could easily copy the content into the new template. That way all the formatting of the articles moved along with the content, apart from the peculiarities of the old template. I have then been slowly adding the new template's tricks to the old content, and little by little everything is starting to be in good shape. I managed to transfer the article view counts to the new one, so the statistics side is in order as a result. I have not yet figured out how to transfer the article ratings, but maybe those too can be brought over in time.

From the old content I also brought over the Community Polls surveys and their results by copying databases. The big sausage comparison of summer 2016 also came over relatively painlessly along with Balbooa Gallery. Balbooa Gallery is also the new image gallery software in place of the old Simple Image Gallery. Balbooa Gallery is stylish and smooth, although it does not bend as well to a bilingual site as SIG Pro. Wegy would have Joomla Gallery ready to use, but at least so far I was not convinced of its suitability for my own needs. The commenting system changed from the Disqus plugin to Komento, meaning that commenting is on the local server from here on. I copied the earlier comments into Komento as they were.

The template would also have forms ready to use, but I replaced them with Balbooa Forms. Balbooa makes more stylish forms possible, and with it I can send an automated and personalized message to the sender of the form. One of Wegy's great features was that you can get a YouTube video playing at the top of the page. Such things have impressed my eye, so it was nice to get one on my own site. There is just one small shortcoming here, because the video does not start playing on a phone. Only the first frame of the video stays visible. It would be good if on a phone a photo could replace the video, but that too would be possible only by paying Templatemonster extra for customization. Maybe this too will be solved by making a video whose first frame contains a suitable picture.

I noticed that the site's search engine works almost too efficiently. I could not exclude the client galleries from the search in any way. This could of course have been prevented by putting the client galleries behind a password, but sometimes that feels like overkill. The Smart Search feature would enable selective searching, but it did not work directly with the search in the menu. Templatemonster would have made that feature for my site for 150 dollars, but I declined. I figured out that the client galleries can be made with K2 articles and K2 can be left outside the search engine. That way this problem was solved too.

When everything was almost ready, I noticed that the bilingualism was causing freezes. The pages froze when switching language or just when browsing the pages otherwise. There seemed to be no direct cause for the problem. I did go through all the language settings several times, but the problems just continued. Templatemonster told me to check the settings, but then they too finally began to investigate the problem. The problem turned out to be the menu module, and recreating it solved the problem.

The same kind of problem was also in the breadcrumps module, as it started to show its own things. The same problem was also on the old site in the wedding photo category. This module also started working nicely by removing the old one and replacing it with a new one. Once again the launch of the site was near, but the mobile menu started freezing on phones. No direct cause was found for this either. Then at some point the problem disappeared when I disabled the site's cache. So the problems can be manifold and their solutions surprising.

My pages from the year 2000 showed up well in Google, so search engine visibility was good on a site made with Notepad. When I got my first Joomla site up, search engine visibility got significantly worse. I do not know the reason exactly, because I tried to keep making the pages search-engine friendly. Now that the pages have been running on the new template for some time, search engine visibility seems to have improved clearly. Perhaps part of the reason for this is the general speeding up of the site. The new template, the new service provider and the better-working image gallery application surely contribute to the speed-up. However, some of the pictures still run on the old gallery, but the intention is to move them to the new side little by little.

The Captcha plugin is still waiting to be switched on. When testing the site I noticed that for some reason bots have not sent me spam through the forms, so to make users' lives easier I have not yet enabled this spam protection. Enabling it is nevertheless only a button press away.

Summary

The redesign of the site's look turned out to be a bigger job than expected, and at first nothing seemed to work. Now the thing is starting to be on the winning side and the site can already be marketed at full speed. With this experience I would once again try a template from a new vendor, because they seem to have quite a few unexpected tricks. Building a website is nevertheless a never-ending thing, and there is always something to develop or improve that comes to mind. The Ilkansivu.net domain has now come off the blacklists, as I have not noticed problems with sending any email anymore.