Is anyone looking after your website?

Almost nothing that goes wrong with a website is bad enough to deal with today. Which is exactly why it is still there a year later.

If the answer is nobody in particular, this is how it tends to go. A website does not fall over the day everybody stops paying attention to it. It keeps taking orders and answering the questions it already knows the answers to, and from the outside it appears to be looking after itself. For a while, it more or less is.

Nothing looks wrong

The software behind the site falls a version behind, then three, because every update carries a small risk of breaking something and there is never a good week for that. A form stops sending and nobody finds out until a customer mentions it, which means the customers who didn’t mention it went elsewhere. Prices drift away from what things actually cost. The backup everyone assumes is happening has not been tested since it was set up, which is another way of saying nobody knows whether it works.

None of these announce themselves. There is no error message for “this page has been wrong since March”. A website with a problem looks exactly like a website without one, right up until the difference shows up in the figures.

The jobs that belong to nobody

Every website comes with a set of jobs that nobody agreed to take on. Keeping the software up to date, and fixing what the updates occasionally break. Checking that the backups actually restore. Renewing the things that expire, at the registrar and the hosting company and the plugin vendor, none of which expire in the same month. Writing the descriptions that give a page a reason to appear in search results. Reading the figures once a month, and noticing when something that used to work has stopped.

In a bigger company these jobs belong to the web team. In a small one they belong to whoever happens to be nearest, which in practice means they belong to nobody, and the site runs on the attention it was given at launch until that runs out.

If the person who built it has gone

Perhaps a freelancer built it and has stopped replying. Perhaps the one member of staff who understood it has left, and their notes turned out to be in their head. Perhaps you have inherited a website along with the business, and nobody can tell you where it is hosted, let alone how to change it.

Taking over a site in that state is normal work for us, not a rescue mission. We track down the access, take a full copy before touching anything, and read what is there. Then we write down what we find, so the situation you are in now cannot happen to you twice. Only after that does the list of things you have been putting up with start getting shorter.

Along the way, anything that is not already in your name goes into it: the domain names, the licences, the accounts the site depends on. We have met too many businesses locked out of their own website because the only person holding the keys stopped answering.

Someone responsible, rather than someone on call

The fix is not a stricter contract, because the problem was never a shortage of contracts. The website needs what every other important part of the business already has: a person whose job it is. What that arrangement looks like, what it covers and what it costs, down to the hourly rate, is set out on our page about looking after your website. The short version is that you pay for the time jobs actually take, and the website stops being the thing nobody owns.

Tell us what you know

You do not need to know what state the site is in before you ask, and you do not need the passwords to hand. Tell us what you know, and what has been going wrong, and we will work out the rest.

0118 950 7617 [email protected]