On Friday afternoon I received a phone call from Jose at NorthWest Landscape Care, a referral from my bookkeeper Plus Minus Accounting. His WordPress website was completely off-line after getting hacked. For two weeks Jose tried locating his webmaster, who quit returning phone calls months before. She apparently moved to California and shut down the company.

Jose’s primary source of new business has been the website, which historically produced 3 -4 phone calls per week. He was near the top of Google Places for “landscaping + Oregon City” and was doing modest paid search through NetBiz. Without the website, lead generation completely stopped and the business was down significantly. His crews were idle. This was an emergency situation.

Unfortunately for Jose, the hosting and domain registration was in the former webmaster’s name. We contacted the hosting company and registrar for access, but struck out.  We immediately started the lengthy process of getting control of the domain name to remedy the situation.