It's amazing how many digital agencies don't offer website maintenance services after they design a site for someone. Many of them possibly don't because they consider it a separate service from the work involved creating a well-designed site.
But that philosophy is utterly wrong. How well your site performs after it's designed ultimately shows the connected dots between design and maintenance.
Even you may not realize the amount of maintenance you'll need after your site is done and launched. It's easy to get taken by a designer who says everything will run perfectly forever. Complacency is a dirty word in a lot of areas of web design and development, and not worrying about the future is certainly a common mistake. This only happens when you've never had experience with anything bad happening.
If you're just now planning a website for your business, you have a lot to consider about what you'll need after your website goes live. The unexpected is more or less a given, and having a web designer willing to provide maintenance services afterward could save your business’s life.
Take the potential issues seriously, particularly the ones that could irk your customers. These are just a few things that a web designer or digital agency should offer as website maintenance services.
Updating Information
All of the information your web developer placed on your site might work in the immediate term. But what happens when you need an immediate content or design change? You might have content that suddenly becomes offensive or irrelevant due to current events or changing circumstances.
A web designer or developer that leaves you on your own after launch could leave you in a lurch if you don't have someone in-house available to do a last-minute fix. Something irrelevant or out-of-date may end up staying on your site for days or weeks because you can't find anyone to take it down or change it.
Likewise, you might want recurring updates on content to reflect sales events and ongoing promotions. Because you may want it in a particular style compatible with your design, you might need your developer to handle it and make it match. Doing it yourself without any true web experience could end up creating blunders on your site that make you look amateurish.
Dealing with Bugs
Code isn't always fail-proof, no matter how much of an expert your developer is. No one can really say why a website suddenly develops a bug; some facetiously say websites have evolving minds of their own. No matter what, bugs are never out of the realm of possibility. And you don't want them cropping up during a critical time when someone is in the middle of buying something from you.
Especially in this mobile era where more people are likely looking you up on the go, you don't want your site to suddenly lag or shut down. The mobile culture wants information fast, and any bugs that slow your site down means losing those on mobile conversions, as well as those on desktop. If lags keep recurring, customers could give up and end up going elsewhere.
With proper maintenance, these problems get monitored and repaired if they happen. In most cases, preventative measures are put into place so they don't happen in the first place.
Saving Money and Time
When you contract maintenance services from your web developer, you also save money. Having someone on retainer off-site saves you from needing a huge in-house IT team on your payroll that you can't afford. Plus, it’s safe to assume that the person who built your site will know it better than anyone else and therefore can fix things much more efficiently, saving you from having to pay someone else for the time it takes them to learn the site anew.
Having maintenance also helps when you have staff away on vacation. Remote maintenance helps keep things under control, since it seems everything goes wrong when no one else is around!
At NPG, we always prefer to help clients maintain the sites we build. A long-term relationship guarantees that any and all issues that crop up weeks, months, or years after launch can be addressed quickly and efficiently. We're there for you to create a perfect design and keep it running efficiently at all times moving forward.
