There’s nothing worse than your website failing to load correctly. It can be stressful and straight-up anxiety-inducing when you go to load your site and end up seeing a blank screen staring back at you. What would you do? Run to your back end and try to troubleshoot? What happens if you cannot locate the issue and the problem persists? Who are you gonna call?
Hop Studios! Wilson Lue, one of Canada’s foremost intellectual property boutique law firms, ran into this exact problem back in 2023. Their site, built initially in-house on an older version of ExpressionEngine in 2018, started giving them the white screen of doom when they tried to load their site. This urgent issue needed to be fixed ASAP and Hop Studios was the team to do it.
Upon investigating the issue, we discovered that the index.php file was not being executed due to an incompatibility problem. To fix this and prevent future problems, including making site maintenance more user-friendly for Wilson Lue’s team, we began by upgrading the ExpressionEngine CMS from version 4 to the newest version, EE7. That upgrade also came with upgrading all existing add-ons, including Sitemap 4.0.0. This would ensure no other incompatibility issues moving forward.
We also implemented a functional 404 page that hadn’t previously existed on the site, which would improve the user experience while browsing the site. Our team made several enhancements to the Wilson Lue mobile site, which is often overlooked when designing a website despite most users browsing on mobile devices. By making the contact phone number clickable, we were able to allow mobile users to contact the firm more easily. We also did a minor tweak to inline photos that weren’t showing correctly in the site’s content. Finally, we added our own Hop Deploybot to the site to help reduce the amount of time being spent on the back-end maintenance of the site, making it easier for the Wilson Lue team.
Hop Studios is extremely pleased that we were able to reduce the stress and quickly fix the white screen of doom the Wilson Lue site had been experiencing. Now, they can focus on tackling intellectual property issues instead of wasting time trying to manage and fix an outdated website. Hop Studios is excited to continue to work with Wilson Lue on their website needs, hopefully without anything else breaking (but don’t worry, we’ll be right there to fix it if it does).
