Websites are often designed, built and delivered with website maintenance being an afterthought, or not at all. After the amendment period (ours is 30 days, which is about industry average) the website’s all yours to do with as you see fit. It’s at this point websites usually get left to their own devices; blogs with barely any posts, forms which inexplicable stop working aren’t fixed & overall design is compromised by images which are just too big or too small.
Past the amends period websites often lack clear ownership.
Ongoing Website Maintenance Contracts
The web, unlike many other marketing mediums, is dynamic and represents total ownership over message and presentation for a website’s administrator.
We can continually tweak and improve our sites, monitoring what works and what does not. This gives us an unprecedented opportunity that is unavailable in any other medium.
Paul Boag – Boag World
Quite apart from the idea of ensuring a level of quality, another clear aim of any ongoing maintenance agreement should be to define marketing goals and achieve them. It’s important that any piece of marketing meets a need and improves the business; a website is no different.
There a number of objectives a support contract can help your business meet:
- Improving traffic and visibility
- Getting more business leads
- Improving your conversion rate (sales in ecommerce, quality leads for other businesses)
- Improving business automation (for example, linking blog articles to social media channels automatically)
What Does Website Maintenance Cover?
In a word, anything. It’s best to start with a clear idea of what you’d like to achieve and work from there. Website maintenance could cover:
- Digital Marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Design tweaks
- Conversion optimisation (get more people to buy/get in touch/do something)
- Site overhauls over a more considered timeframe
- Functional fixes
In addition, it give you the ability to call someone if things go a little pear shaped.