Every business needs a website. Every website needs help! You can see where this is going. Your business requires website help to maintain and update the site. It’s tempting to think you can it all on your own. But you really can’t. I believe the only people with time to support your website are the website experts on your team, in-house or contracted. Here’s why.
Website Help Requires Professional Skill and Concentrated Effort
Most websites I’ve ever worked on required at least ten hours of active pointing, clicking, and configuring to set up the first time. There are many other hours to complete the necessary meetings, correspondence, planning, and related prep work like resizing images and writing text.
Will you be your own website help on the weekends? You could!
But that would make it a hobby project and not a key piece of your business success. And hobby projects rarely turn out perfectly polished on time and on budget. Your website is much too important to your sales today and tomorrow to have it languish until the weekend. Not to mention all the times your site will go down unexpectedly.
Websites Go Down While You’re In Meetings
The time and resources required to build your website are just the start. There’s also the emotional and mental bandwidth you’ll need to deal with breakdowns. Websites are like any other man-made tool. They tend to decline, break, and sometimes disappear. Even the most efficient, 24/7 systems in the world encounter faults and derail. This happens all the time, at all hours.
How valuable is your time at work? How much are you willing to lose? You might have an hourly rate you offer to clients, but it’s your own time is completely priceless to you. Especially when we think of the cost of interruptions. It’s impossible to know if resolving a website problem will be ten minutes or two hours. Please trust someone dedicated to maintaining your website to help you. Pay them so you don’t lose your own time to sudden breakdowns.
Even when your site is relatively stable, as most website are, you should have a commitment to continuous improvement. And that means hitting the books. Or, rather, the search engines.
Websites Require Research Time
One of the biggest time requirements for website developers and website owners is research. When you’re building an all-new site, even if you have various pre-built components or predefined tools, there are always new requirements or new ideas to investigate. And if you’re just trying to fix what you have, you may need to spend even more time decoding cryptic error messages or trying to diagnose bizarre behavior.
I spend a significant amount of time collecting information about new website products and services. It’s part of the satisfaction of working with technology!
Are you interested in researching web design and website building? If you like these topics, then you won’t have an issue spending the time required to support your website with good troubleshooting and research. But if it’s not your thing, then you’re really going to feel stuck when you try to take on website duties alone.
Who’s taking care of your website now? It should be someone on your team whose job includes dedicated time to check in and know what’s going on with it day to day. Or if you run a small team in-house with no dedicated website manager, I think you truly need a support contract with experienced professionals. For the good of your customers and your business, stay supported.
Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash
