The Story About How It All Started
We have an excellent team working in our Website Maintenance Department. Working in that department is probably about the toughest job we have at our company.
Our maintenance staff needs to be able to:
- Get a new project (often from a brand new client with no prior history with us)
- Troubleshoot the problem or get familiar with the website
- Figure out how to access that website
- Take a backup of the files/database
- Do the work
- Do testing
- Deliver the completed work
They’re into new projects and clients all the time and they’re going into that work somewhat blind. They also need to manage tickets and set short-term deadlines.
So they do a lot and we’ve got a great system set up but how did it start?
The Quick Story
Webstix started in 2001 and we were working on creating websites and doing projects. We then started getting requests from our clients for updates to their websites. We would do that for them gladly, but we had to take programmers off of projects to take care of these smaller requests.
The problem was, those programmers wouldn’t want to leave their projects because they had good momentum going. Sometimes, these maintenance requests would get pushed off longer than what our clients expected, so we needed to fix this problem.
Our solution was to set up a department just for handling website maintenance.
We started with just 2 people and their job was to handle the smaller requests (requests that aren’t full projects) that came in so that we could turn those requests around quickly.
Next, we realized billing was getting out of hand. We were charging clients an hourly rate and we had to send out small invoices. We had to manage invoices and our clients would have to spend time paying these small invoices – it was just too much work… for everyone.
The solution… Maintenance Blocks!
With Maintenance Blocks (where 1 block = 1/2 hour of time), clients can pre-pay packs of blocks and use them as they need them because they never expire. Our services then because on-demand instead of maintenance contracts, which is a good value for our clients.
When our clients pre-pay packs of blocks, they get discounts. The more they buy, the bigger the discount!
And Now Here We Are!
We’re now providing our valuable website maintenance service to clients around the United States and even the world. We have clients in Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Mexico and Asia.
Many first time clients find out how well we communicate with them and they continue to work with us. We even get them coming to us for website projects because they like how we work and the value we provide.
Our team has experience and expertise with many kinds of websites. They like figuring out problems and they’re good at it. If we find something is, by chance, over our heads or something we don’t have good experience with, then we’ll tell you so you can find another provider. We don’t want you wasting your money. We’ll even try to help you find a provider.
Our goal with website maintenance is to provide value and keep you updated on work we’re doing for you. Communication is key and we know that communication in our industry is typically very poor. We see that as an opportunity to shine and set ourselves apart from our competition.
Conclusion
There you go… that’s the story. As Ikea would say… “Now you know!”
We look forward to providing outstanding service to you for years to come!