10/08/2026
⚠️ DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!
Building your own website is easier than ever. But troubleshooting it isn’t.
This week I ran into a website problem I had never encountered before — and I’ve been building websites since 1996.
One page on a client’s website was suddenly returning a 403 Forbidden error. The page looked fine. The coding looked fine. Other pages worked normally.
So I made an exact copy and uploaded it under a different filename.
Same website. Same server. Same code.
The copy worked. The original didn’t.
It took about an hour just to isolate the problem with one web page. Now the hosting company gets to figure out why that particular filename is being blocked.
Building your own website may save you the cost of having a web designer build it. But when something goes wrong, where do you even start?
Experience doesn’t mean you’ve seen every problem before. Sometimes it simply means knowing how to approach a problem you’ve never seen before.
If your website has you wondering “Where do I even start?”, I’m always happy to offer an experienced second opinion.