Proper website design and maintenance for your small business is essential to keeping your website safe from hackers, Making your business look professional online, keeping up with the changes in technology and if something breaks on your website or stops functioning (happens all the time) you have a web professional at your side to help fix anything. Most business don’t understand how important there website is today, if you are selling products or services to B2B or B2C your website is often the first impression your customers have with your business. It is essential to have a professional looking website that is easy to use for your customers.
The Importance Of Website Design And Maintenance
Many businesses hire a web designer and don’t even think about maintaining a website both for the design and technical maintenance of the website, both change and both need updating. If you have hired a web designer and they don’t maintain your website every month, you will have problems in the future. When choosing to hire a web designer this is what they need to do for your business to help make your site run better, if they are not doing any maintenance on your website I would run away from them. Here are some of the important procedures for maintaining a website:
Support – I think support is probably the most important step in maintaining a website. You hired a web professional so that you can get there expertise and help when needed, but if they don’t support your website on a monthly basis and if you need to change anything on your website then it will either cost a lot to hire another designer/programmer to make changes or it won’t get done. Support is by far the most important. many web designers disappear after they build your website and it makes it super challenging to update your site when you want to make changes.
Hosting – Some web companies offer hosting and other require you to host it on your own servers, either way is fine, but if a company is working on my website and keeping it up to date i would want them to host it just in case they needed to access anything on the server.
Security – This step is well overlooked in the web design world. All sites have a high percentage chance of getting hacked and usually the hacker puts a virus on your website, completely destroys it or redirects it to an inappropriate website that can hurt your company’s reputation. Even if you don’t sell products on your website it would be a good idea to keep it safe so you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars to fix any damage.
Software Updates – Websites are made with software and if software is not updated your website will stop working correctly or it will get hacked if you stop updating it.
Monthly Reporting – I think if you invest money into a website you should know how people are finding your website online and how many visitors a month. Most web design companies don’t give you tracking for your website so you can understand your online audience and market better, I think it is essential to at least receive monthly reports about your website so you can understand how to improve it.
If you are a small business looking to invest into a website for your small business, I would recommend that you find a web design company that designs a professional website, supports the website monthly and maintains the site properly so you can focus on your business and not worry about website issues.
If you are interested in our service we help small business afford a quality website that is supported an maintain properly, we currently charge $179/mo for website design and maintenance, with no set up fees or extra costs to your small business, most web design companies charge around $6,000 to $10,000 to set up a basic website and then they don’t maintain or support it for your business, contact us if you want a quality website with monthly support and maintenance.