It’s New Year’s eve and millions of people are headed out to parties. Parties at friends’ homes, at bars, at friends of friends, at third cousins twice removed becuase they have free beer, at… you get the point.
Well, take note those of you who manage large (humongous) web properties with major web traffic and a consumer base with significant loyalty – don’t schedule “maintenance” updates to your site during times when your product or service is relied upon extremely heavily! Shame on you evite.com.
evite.com, one of the largest online event creation and management sites for regular folks like you and me, decided to go with a scheduled maintenance tonight. Seriously, what are you thinking? I wonder the impact on their consumer – how will they react? They’re already reacting on Twitter. More importantly, how many fights about directions and missing the New Year’s countdown between married couples, boyfriends and girlfriends and first time dates will they be the blame for? Does evite realize how much folks rely on directions, addresses and other important contact information that’s on the event page?
Regardless, a lesson to take out of this heading into 2009 – Do no consumer harm. Avoid it at all costs in a down economy. And, if you can’t manage to do no harm, make sure you own up to your mistakes.
It seems worth noting that Evite deleted the four or so comments critical of Evite’s going down for all of New Year’s Eve. The comments were on the New Year post on the Evite blog: http://blog.evite.com/evite/2008/12/happy-happy.html There’s no mention on the blog that Evite suffered a large outage.
Interesting, thanks for posting the comment. As a registered evite user, I’m curious if they will even acknowledge it via a communication email or something. Sounds like they were deleting the posts to cover up their woopsie. Hhhmmmm….