OK so we have got a lot of calls and emails recently about what in the world happened to Gold Party LLC and the website. So many requests we cannot keep up with them at this time. So here is the explanation.
History
First we are going to have to give a little history. Early 2008 our company decided we wanted to do a educational series dedicated to helping others get into the scrap gold buying business. For reasons we now deeply regret, we decided to have the website coded in ASP.NET(a proprietary Microsoft language). Not that it is a bad platform, it was just overkill for what we were doing here.
So fast forward to 2010. In that year Gold Party LLC went through some restructuring as an organization, including cutting ties with the original developer of the Gold Party LLC instructional website. The plan then was to eventually port the old webfiles to a more manageable language software (and of course updating the look). Basically we were going to take the scratch the old website and develop a new one with PHP to make it easier to manage. We had actually created a new template (the one we are now using) to accomplish this goal. However like all things set for change, this one was put on the back burner many times because of other pressing issues.
Where it all fell apart December 2011.
So right after Christmas of last year a majority of the Gold Party LLC team was set for a month long consulting job in Asia and New Zealand. Sometime around the end of November we had a hard drive failure. It just so happened to be the one that held the back up files for the old “running” site. This was not that big of a deal at the time because we also had backups done from our webhosting company.
Also back in the beginning of December we noticed a problem with the website as it had gone done and we requested a server restart from the webhost with the backup files they had stored. All of which they accomplished fine. . The team left overseas as planned, including our main tech guy. We do have one part time tech guy, but anything more then basic maintenance was outside of his job scope and the instructional website is not his priority, in fact he had no training on it at all.
So sometime after New Years we get an email from a part time tech guy about the educational site being down with some error codes displaying. No problem we tell him just have our hosting company restart the server with the backup. No go. The only backups have all failed because of a Microsoft licensing issue according to our webhosts. We go back and forth for a week with us blaming them and them blaming us. In the end it really doesnt matter, what mattered was getting it back up.
So we decided to go and implement our plan of the website overhaul we had stated the year before. However our one main backup of the old files died with the hardrive and the other copies are scattered around on different computers with the only person not overseas that could deal with them, clueless on where they were and how to properly develop the new site. OUCH!
So Our Plan.
So our only plan of attack was to create the new site with our tech guy emailing our part time guy with the details and some Skyping when available. This created some difficulties to say the least. The site was live and being developed slowly a little every day. Things were missing and links were broken etc. But we are moving it forward.
So we apologize for any problems this has cause you, and thank you for being patient with us. As of today, 30 January 2012, we are about at 70%. Hopefully we will be complete by the time we all get back home. We should be back up no later the February 5th (hopefully).
Gold Party LLC
