I just had an email from a former colleague at Black Sheep asking if I’d heard of the business ‘Oakridge Steel’. The name rang a bell to me and after some research I remembered.
It seems that Oakridge Steel have contacted him asking where their website has gone. When I worked at Meridian Design we hosted their website, which was designed by Darren Joslin before he moved to another company. As you can see from the Internet Archive, the site was somewhat poor. Piss poor in fact. Oakridge Steel never renewed their hosting with Meridian Design, so I deleted their website.
Something of a service to the Internet as a whole, I’m sure you’ll agree. This was in February 2005. Then Meridian Design was taken over by Black Sheep. Now, nearly THREE YEARS LATER Oakridge Steel have noticed their website doesn’t work!!!
I’m staggered, truly staggered.
How poor must this company’s website have been performing for them if it took them nearly 3 years to notice their site had gone down? Sadly this is an all too familiar tale with the websites built by Meridian before I joined them.
If you have a website for your company ask yourself this; would it take you 3 years to notice if your website disappeared? If the answer is yes, you should look at getting yourself a new website.
Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.
