Firm Pitfall : Website Maintenance
January 9th, 2008 | Posted in Pitfalls.What kind of company do you want to create? An internet marketing firm that provides online success to it’s clients? Or a design shop that features great designs and customer satisfaction?
Either route you choose, be aware of the consequences of some of your business and website practices. One common pitfall I’ve found is website maintenance. For example, the internet marketing firm that I currently work for has around 1500 clients that they provide website maintenance for.
Now you maybe asking yourself, what’s the problem?
The problem isn’t that they are providing maintenance, the problem is how their client sites were setup and how they are falling behind on profit.
Around 90% of the sites that the company developed were built statically. Meaning that they were simple HTML web pages. Secondly, due to a low amount of designers, whom are doing the maintenance work are falling behind on new client designs.
SOLUTIONS:
- Build every site with a content management system. Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or even a custom in house application. This will make the site easier to manage and allow less design savvy resources to perform updates.
- Allocate resources wisely. Put together a team that will make maintenance their primary job.
- Outsource the changes to hungry freelancers.
- If maintenance is the only thing you are providing for a client, ask yourself: is it worth it? If I wasn’t doing maintenance for Client XYZ, would I be able to make more profit from my primary focus? If you answered yes, then maybe it’s time to refer your maintenance clients to another company for a finders fee.
What do you think?
Post a comment below to express how you feel about website maintenance.
Profit From Web Site Maintenance
March 13th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
[...] post is going to contradict my previous post regarding the pitfalls of website maintenance. One may ask, how can you gain profit by providing website maintenance? The answer relates to my [...]