Have you ever totally botched a site?

[Suckerpunch]

Here's a quick question for you all... have you ever just totally botched one of your sites and destroyed your traffic when you were doing something such as a redesign or script installation?

Generally I am pretty good at planning things but having a new traffic script installed on one of my sites has turned an 8k a day to about 800 uniques a day. Here is the story...

I decided to upgrade http://www.cheerleaderalley.com from an old trading script to Zero, which I had heard great things about. While installing the script I used my old database instead of a fresh one which wiped by trading information out as well as my tgp gallery engine. The gallery engine ran the rotation on several sites and I hadn't backed it up in ages making the backup useless. I spent the next two weeks getting the tgp engine back up to speed.

All the while traffic started dwindling. I finally started converting the templates for the traffic trades to the new script a few days ago and concentrated on a few areas. Once I was happy with what I had I password protected the zero directory and let things run. I checked the stats and noticed that the traffic continued to dwindle...

As it turns out I password protected the wrong directory so the trade templates would not load. I finally realized my error after receiving a few emails from surfers asking what was going on.

So at long last I have the site running again and while I still have a few templates to fix traffic is flowing once again.

Sigh... I'm an idiot.