You hired a designer to build your website and now you have changes to make. You can’t get a phone call back or changes take weeks or a months to get made. What can you do?

Most web designers are one or two person companies who work out of their homes. They focus on making new sales and then producing that website. Even though they have the best of intentions, they simply don’t have the bandwidth to service what they design. They many times are not the right choice for business website maintenance.

You need to align your business with a company that actively maintains and services websites, a website maintenance service. There are a lot of them out there. What should you look at? You need to match their services with your needs.

1. Company: Look at the size of the company; do they have multiple people doing this work? How long have they been in business? Are they local to you? Give them a call and ask about turn around guarantees. Were they easy to contact? How comfortable would you be in working with them?
2. Services: Look at the available services. Almost all will make text updates, replacing and updating images and adding new pages. Others will offer hosting, monthly back-ups for your website, web design, fast response on changes, text writing, SEO services, fixing current web applications, building new database programs or even web marketing consulting.
3. Hosting: It is a good idea to host with your website maintenance service if they provide quality business hosting. This will usually give you access to regular website backups. Your maintenance service can then give full technical support for your website.
4. Contracts: You will usually have a choice between by the hour service or a retainer maintenance agreement. Pay-by-the-hour service is usually the best choice if you only have occasional changes to make. Prepaid agreements usually give priority service and discounted prices, but you pay for the hours whether you use them or not.

Website maintenance is an important part of your business marketing. Choices shouldn’t be made based on lowest price, but on the best value to your marketing effort.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 5:28 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.