Inconvenient Facts
Often in politics, as in life, the facts get in the way of a good story. Such is the case with the recent events surrounding Nikki Haley’s web site. The facts are usually boring, long and more importantly they don’t generally fit in to the caricatures some people try to advance of their opponents in this business.
This weekend I received some comments about our decision to remove Rep. Haley’s site from our company’s server. I felt the need to respond, but not for the reason you might think. First, hardly anyone who disagreed with my decision said anything to me. Unfortunately, the current political environment in South Carolina lends itself to discourse being lessened to anonymous blog comments about courtesy, honor and political courage by those who lack enough of any of the aforementioned qualities to stand by their comments in public. But artificial courage from behind a keyboard is a whole other matter in-and-of-itself. What drives me to respond, are the comments by many of those who were delighted by the decision to remove Rep. Haley’s site from our server. Many assume it was simply a well-played political maneuver to disrupt the gubernatorial announcement of an opposing candidate. They are incorrect.
Now, for the boring facts of the story. Rep. Haley contacted our firm about six months ago to have us design and launch a web site for her. We did so and she seemed to be very happy with the site. Then last Saturday May 9th, Rep. Haley politely e-mailed us saying that she wanted someone else to handle her site and asked that we transfer the work we’ve done. She said she needed it quickly. We said we’d be happy to transfer the files and did not even intend to bill her for the work to do so. We assumed based on the rumors, it was because she would be running for Governor but she did not directly say that was the case. This worked out fine for us because two months prior we signed a contract with Congressman Gresham Barrett to build his site for his gubernatorial campaign. Clearly, if Rep. Haley were running for Governor we could no longer help her with her site.
Rep. Haley did not give us any sort of deadline of when she needed the files, other then to say she needed it “quickly.” She also, did not want to tell us who would be doing her website, but wanted us to give her the information she would provide to this anonymous person transferring her site. The problem is that to access her web site and all of its files we have to give them access to our server. The same server that houses many of our other clients. Obviously we were not interested in giving access to our company web server to some web consultant she didn’t want to name. And I’m pretty confident that every one of our clients is would appreciate those kinds of decisions by us. So it took several days to put the content in a secure place on our server that was walled off from the rest of our sites. We sent Rep. Haley all of the information and content she needed on late Wednesday, three business days after she first asked. At the time we thought this was a sufficiently “quick” turnaround time. Not only did we do the transfer in a timely manor, we did all of this without asking for a single penny for the labor it took to move the content and create to a secure spot.
What did we get for trying to be helpful? On Thursday when Rep. Haley announces for Governor on the Internet, she did so with a link to her website that had not yet been removed from our server and still had our company name at the bottom of it with a link to our company site. She did all of this without so much as the courtesy of a call or e-mail to notify us. Obviously the appearance of our firm working for two separate candidates for the same office is not a flattering one. So I made the decision to take her site off of our company’s server. We left all of the files and other content for her site in a place where she could get them. However, I was not going to allow her to launch her campaign on a site with our name at the bottom of it on a server we were paying for.
In response to all of this her supporters quickly began to attack us on the blogs and through word of mouth. It was even claimed by her supporters that it was Congressman Barrett’s campaign that had requested I pull the site. That is completely untrue.
So today, after we had sent them everything they needed, and they still couldn’t figure out how to transfer the domain name to their new website… And they were telling folks that we “didn’t give them all the information.” What did we do? Someone with our company actually got on the phone with Justin Evans, a Haley staffer who is very polite, and another Haley supporter, and held a conference call with their server company and our server company to help them complete the transaction.
So if you’ve made it this far in the story you clearly have too much free time on your hands (as, obviously do I since I took the time to write it) but I hope you’ll get the point of it all. Which is you can’t quite believe the spin on the blogs… especially when the spin comes directly from rival operatives supporting their own candidate. Oh, and the facts actually do matter.