Rebuilt Theme for an Older WordPress Site After the Original Theme “Expired.”
The office manager at Lincolnwood Acupuncture and Chiropractic Center contacted me because their website showed the infamous “critical error” message. A little digging showed that while the actual server, and happens with some older websites, the display software the site had been built with (a.k.a. the site’s “theme,”) no longer ran after their hosting company updated their server software.
This is a particular problem with older purchased themes. Too often the company that sold the theme stops making updates. In this case the original company had gone out of business long ago.
As I said, the content of the site was still good — that’s a wonderful feature of WordPress websites. So all I had to do was extract the files and database from their server and reassemble the site on my desktop web server. I kept “dialing back” the version of PHP on my server until the site finally came back up. Once I could see what it was supposed to look like, I was able to find a new, free and open-source theme that let me reproduce the old “look and feel.”
At some point in the future these clients may have me do complete update to their website so that it doesn’t look so old-school. But since their request was to simply get the site back online that’s what I did.
The good news is that while the site may still look old-school, it should continue to survive future server and software updates for another ten years.
(Frequently asked question: Why don't we always provide links to the websites we build? While the images you see are of the websites as we delivered them, one of our core values as web developers is "it's your website!" We teach our clients to how to update and manage their own websites. That means that over time their sites change to meet their needs, and so we don't feel it's fair to take credit for their contributions.)