Websites By Liz

Web Design for Small Businesses

Troubleshooting Steps

Whether it’s a computer, your car, a household appliance or anything else, troubleshooting is a matter of narrowing a lot of possible problems down to the most likely one.

Basically:

  1. Check to see if it’s the equipment or device by testing it on some other piece of hardware.
  2. If applicable, check to see if it’s specific software (for example, if it’s a website and you usually use IE, try it on Chrome or Firefox).
  3. If it’s something that’s accessible elsewhere, try it from a different location or have a friend try it out (this would weed out location-based or provider-based issues).
  4. Reboot/restart/clear cache/run updates (it’s recommended that you run a backup before you do any updates).
  5. When reasonable, wait a few minutes or an hour to see if it was a temporary glitch.

After narrowing it down if you still need help, or you were’t able to narrow it down, contact a pro and give them these pieces of information.

  1. What you did.
  2. What was supposed to happen.
  3. What actually happened.
  4. Your troubleshooting steps and results.