Hiring a Webmistress will keep your website is secure and up to date so that you don’t have to do it yourself. Believe me, it can be a daunting task so make sure you take a look at the Case Study – 2022 at the end of the the blog. Today, we want to inform website owners about the benefits of having a webmistress and a website maintenance plan.
Your Webmistress/Webmaster is the person responsible for the maintenance and operation of your website. Hiring a Webmistress or Webmaster gives you a professional who will manage your website content and optimize it for search engines (SEO) by creating articles and using other methods to increase your rankings. Your Webmistress or Webmaster will ensure that all of the core parts of your website are updated, maintained and back-up on a regular basis.
If you don’t have the right Webmistress or Webmaster, you’re in trouble! If you are not keeping up with the latest design trends and constantly changing requirements by the search engines, your visitors won’t see your site. They won’t find it on Google, Bing or Edge, and they certainly won’t come back to try to find your business. And that means no sales!
Your Webmistress or Webmaster will deal with any of the back end issues with your Hosting Company that may arise from time to time
Website maintenance is a MUST, even if you are just starting out. When you have any type of website, make sure you understand what needs to be done to keep it running smoothly. It is not easy and most business owners have absolutely no idea what it takes to keep a website up and running. You never know when you might need a hand and it’s much easier if you can just send an e-mail or pick up the phone and get in touch with “your expert!”
A website without maintenance will stay the same and will become a waste of time and money. When you keep on adding new content you need to keep it current. That means that you have to update everything. Blogging is especially important for adding new content. The search engines LOVE blogs. Investigative blog-writing may be included in your website maintenance plan for a small additional cost.
Having a well maintained site shows your customers that you care about their experience and that you are serious about delivering the quality service they expect. Website maintenance ensures that all of your website’s internal and external links are working properly. If you have downloadable items such as recipes or fact sheets, your Webmistress or Webmaster will make sure that these items are formatted properly, uploaded to the correct drive on your hosting server and that all the downloads work properly. Nothing ticks a customer off more than trying to get something from your site and it doesn’t work!
Websites aren’t cheap. You can’t just install a website, then leave it and hope it’ll take care of itself. A good website makes all the difference. A bad website can cost your company money and time. You need to invest in a Website Maintenance plan. Otherwise you could end up with a site that is expensive, doesn’t work, and doesn’t generate any business.
Our client went live on April 3, 2022. Her business website was working perfectly on that date. Web Dezyn Plus always offers a complementary 30 day Website Maintenance plan. Two weeks into this complementary month, our client wanted to learn how to do her own recipes and blogs. Plus she felt that she could do her own website maintenance because she knew “a little bit about WordPress.” We spent an hour on the basics – backups, simple SEO optimization, duplicating pages, uploading recipes, creating links, etc. I knew after that session that she was going to be in trouble. At this time, it was explained that Standard maintenance covers updates to the current site, weekly backups, hosting issues, blogging and social media integration and does not support any “breakage” that is not a direct result of updates to either the current working plugins or themes on a working website. It was clearly explained at that time about the cost of a “breakage” due to client error. Our client was determined to take over the maintenance of her website anyway because she felt that she could not afford a Website Maintenance plan. Of course, that is every client’s right.
Within two days of taking over as webmaster, a plugin was installed because of something she read on-line. Her site already had a similar plugin which was operating correctly. The new plugin wrote over portions of the current one, and guess what! 404 Errors all over the place. Over 30 internal and external links had been broken on her site.
The call for help came in!!! After discussing the issues with her, I tried to restore her latest backup, which as it turned out, she as the new webmaster, had taken after installing the bad plugin.
So where does it stand now. As a courtesy, I have placed her site “under maintenance” so the search engines won’t crawl her site until all of the broken links are repaired. Based on the expertise of my client, my estimated time for her to make these repairs will be a couple of weeks. That is a long time for a website to be down.
Nobody can be an expert on everything. I have spent years working on, designing, and maintaining websites for a number of clients. This is the first one who decided not to take advantage of Web Dezyn Plus’ expertise and the result is a badly broken website.
Don’t be Case Study – 2022.
We really felt for Case Study 2022 so as one-time courtesy repair, our senior tech, was able to work with her Hosting Company (and our recommended favourite Canadian one – Host Papa) to locate the last good back-up of her site and restore it. Of course, some of the links were still not connecting so we took care of that for her as well. Her site is back on-line and she is again ready to take over as her own administrator. We wish her well but expect to hear from her often going forward.
It’s been a few months and out of curiosity we decided to go and take a look for Case Study Client 2022;s website. Nosy, I know, but I’m always really curious when people attempt their own website maintenance. What we found was not surprising. When Website Maintenance is not kept up so that your website is at the latest WordPress core files and all the other updates are completed successfully. (Always using a testing site first to make sure that things work properly before pushing anything out to a live site is a big part of your Webmistress or Webmaster’s job.)
After all the work that our client did to get her website up and running, after all the money invested in her website design, after all the time and training that we provided for her — the image above says it all! Don’t be a Case Study 2022 with your website.
It’s our opinion that unless you, the business owner, has the time and the patience to take on all the nuances of maintaining a website, keeping up with the technical changes which literally happen on a daily basis, and manage your own social media; it’s much cheaper in the long run to hire a webmistress and build a Website Maintenance Plan into your yearly budget.
Leave the “driving” to us and let us take care of your website. If you’d like more information, just complete the form below and we’ll be happy to chat with you.
Cheers!
