You mention options such as "...revert the site to how it was..." which
implies that even though you don't host the site, you at least have ftp access
to the server?
If that is the case, a method I found highly effective with a 'repeat
offender' a few years back...
1 - Copy the entire site to a CD/DVD
2 - Replace the index.*** page with a simple "This site is currently
offline for maintenance, sorry for the inconvenience. Please check back later."
page. (Optional - set ownership flags to prevent them overwriting it - server
willing)
3 - Email them an invoice for the overdue amount, plus $50 for the
'hassle fee' (rephrase to suit your level of bluntness)
4 - Wait for the client to come crawling...
In most case it took my (ex) client less than a week to notice and come
calling asking for reactivation.
Sure, it's not the *nicest* way to deal with the situation, but by the
sounds of it your client isn't interested in *nice* anyway.
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*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
On 28/02/2009 at 7:27 a.m. Harvey Kane wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>In my 10 years of business, I have had almost no problems with clients
>not paying. I now have a client that owes a smallish amount (< $1000)
>for some basic on-page SEO work that was done to his site, which is now
>60+ days overdue and he's not responding at all to any attempts to
>contact. He indicated earlier that he was happy with the work, so I
>don't think the non-payment is due to dissatisfaction.
>
>I don't host the website, so I can't simply turn off the hosting or use
>the regular methods for getting people's attention (eg disabling their
>CMS access or putting a generic error message on the homepage). I have
>deleted the backup I took of the site before I started the work once the
>revamped site was live and stable - so I can't simply revert the site to
>how it was. I can manually undo the changes I made to the site, but this
>is likely to take a few hours to do, and I'm loathed to spend much more
>time on this for obvious reasons - however I'm not happy about simply
>ignoring it and letting him have the work for free.
>
>I have just sent him a notice saying he has 7 days to pay or make an
>arrangement with me, otherwise I will 'remove the site from Google'. I'm
>hoping this has the desired effect, and he pays his bill.
>
>However, if he calls my bluff, I will need to take action of some sort.
>I'd be interested in everyone's thoughts on how to approach this. There
>are plenty of ways to remove pages from Google (robots.txt, meta tags,
>removal request, 404 headers etc), though some of these are
>semi-permanent. And it just doesn't seem professional to do permanent
>damage to a client's domain, as well as any legal considerations of
>doing this.
>
>Any thoughts or comments appreciated.
---
Karl
Senior Account Manager
www.KIWIreviews.co.nz ... Where Your Views Count
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