We’ve come across alot of clients recently who would rather ‘own’ their own website than pay us to manage it for them in the long term. They’re not interested in the additional fees that a web designer would charge to make updates to content and/or minor design tweaks. They wan’t to own it outright and pay their staff to maintain it for them. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with this.
We always say to our clients who want to ‘own’ their website that we’re always here should something go wrong. On the flipside things do go wrong, plugins and themes don’t get updated, content gets deleted accidentally, changes are made that don’t reflect the original style of the website. The website can end up looking like a dog’s dinner! This reflects poorly on us, the designer and you, the client. Having a website with errors and design flaws makes your business look poor. Unfortunately people are very fickle and a poor website screams BAD BUSINESS! And unfortunately in this day and age users move on…very quickly!
If you want to ‘own’ your own website make sure you know the risks. Get handover notes from your web designer, if you haven’t got any, ask for some. Make sure you update your plugins and themes. Make sure you do backups. Make sure your staff are trained properly to make website updates. Make sure you contact your designer when things do go wrong. If you don’t feel confident that you can manage your own website then pay a professional to do it for you. It’s not as expensive as you think and you can rest assured that your website will stay looking as it good as it was designed to do.
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