Help With Updates to a Business Website
When you’re looking for business website maintenance services, there are a number of things to make sure you get if you want to make sure your business website is handled well and so that the work is done correctly.
11 Things to Look for With a Website Maintenance Services Provider
- Does the website design firm have a good history of doing website maintenance?
- Does the website design firm have a dedicated team for doing website maintenance work or do they have to pull developers off of projects?
- Will you get a quote confirming what needs to be done before the work begins?
- Do they take backups of files and databases before they begin?
- Is the work tested in the latest versions of major web browsers to ensure all website visitors see your web pages correctly?
- Is the work double checked to ensure it was done right?
- Do they write up a log that sits on your website stating which files were updated and when so that there’s a history of your website updates?
- Do you get a complete report with URLs showing the completed work?
- Does the website company you choose suggest other work that needs to be done?
- Do they guarantee their work?
- Is the pricing flexible? Are you stuck in a contract or do you only pay for the work you want done?
Your business website is critical. It must be handled with care and updates need to be done in a way where they can be rolled back, if needed. They should treat your website as if they’re updating their own website (or better).
At Webstix, we take care of all the items you see above. No, we’re not the cheapest company around doing web maintenance but do you really want the cheapest bidder working on your website? Do you want to find out weeks or months later that the work wasn’t done right or that somehow search engines were blocked from crawling your website?
Production and Staging Environments
With Webstix Website Maintenance, we’re comfortable working in production (live) environments or with staging websites. How you want to work is up to you and fine with us. If you need a staging environment set up, we can help with that. It does take time to set up correctly but it’ll help make sure your website is always looking its best and you’ll get to preview changes before they go live.
With some of our clients that do not have staging website environments, we often do provide mockups showing what we’ll do before we go ahead with the work. That’s another option. We do need to charge time for creating the mockups but with this system, you do get a preview of how things will look when the work is completed. This is your option.
Maintenance Contracts
If there’s more than 40 hours of work needed per month, we can work out a contract with you. Most of our clients prefer to use our Maintenance Blocks system where you pre-pay for 1/2 hour blocks of time and then have those blocks available in your account to use. It’s up to you. Sometimes a retainer contract makes sense but again, most clients appreciate when the cost and pricing is set up so that they only pay for what they actually use.
We do offer discounts for pre-payment. You can buy a 6-pack (3 hours), 12-pack (6 hours), 24-pack (12 hours) and 48-pack (24 hours) of website maintenance work and use it however you want. This reduces billing costs and saves time. We keep your blocks balance online for you to refer to at any time. You can set up authorized users if you want. Here’s a sample of how that Maintenance Blocks balance page looks:
Conclusion
Getting an experience website design company that has a team of experts makes the most sense when choosing business website maintenance services. We even have a new client offer you can use if you just want to try us out. We promise to do our best to help you as we want to be your website partner.
-Tony