Getting your website live is a huge milestone and is often the culmination of months of planning, organisation and cooperation between so many groups of people: stakeholders, marketers, SEO analysts, content creators, designers, developers and project managers, to name a few. But the work doesn't end there.
Maintaining your website to keep it functioning and up to date is always a good idea. But what about making improvements and moving with the times? In the modern digital age, we must continuously innovate and stay abreast of changing trends and policies. This is where your web development agency can help.
Website Support
This is the basic care and maintenance that your website will require, such as updating the CMS and those essential plugins. Security and functional updates are released by software companies regularly, and it is good practice to keep your site updated with these new patches.
At LuckyTurn Media we offer this service for a fixed monthly fee, and it will cover all updates barring any major jumps in the version of your CMS that may add more than a couple of hours of development time. We will also fix any bugs related to our own work within 6 months of carrying it out.
Think of 'support' as the maintenance side of your website.
Retainer
Driving the site forward to build growth and engagement also requires regular improvements and adjustments. Have you ever landed on a website and found it so outdated that it left a bad taste in your mouth for the company behind it? There are still many sites today that aren't responsive, so when viewing on your mobile they are very unpleasant to navigate. Does that encourage you to do business with them? Probably not! They built a website but never moved it forward, so what else do they fail to do?
Technology advances. What was 'in' yesterday can be 'out' tomorrow. We all know it's an ever-changing world and can sometimes be a struggle to keep up, but that's what your web agency can help with. They keep abreast of the latest advancements so you don't have to, and they'll work out how best to make them fit with your site, your brand and your goals.
It's not just the world around us that drives change. As your own company grows and evolves your clientele may also change, and this may bring about the need to develop your site in a different direction. These are just a few situations we've dealt with lately:
- A marketing team wanted to create more dynamic content for their blog, so we designed and built a dozen new UI components for them. All had to be on-brand and work with the existing content. The challenge was in giving all of the new blocks logical names!
- Another client changed CRM so we needed to update the connection between that and the website.
- Someone else launched a membership program so we developed everything they needed from the account area to the public login.
This is where a Retainer comes in; improvement of a website, rather than maintenance. All agencies have their own method but at LTM we have two different options:
Contract
An agreed number of hours, set aside for you every month and invoiced monthly. This time can be used for design, development, SEO or content analysis. A contract retainer is the best way to keep a site always evolving and improving, and works well with a long-term strategy for growth.
Ad-Hoc
Work done as and when you'd like, although the monthly hours aren't guaranteed and it's best to give a few weeks notice if possible. With both options you'll get an estimate up front, so there shouldn't be any surprises!
