Do I need website maintenance?

You know, we suffer some hard knocks in business, especially those of us who choose to work for ourselves. We have no ‘buffer’ of secretaries or departments to handle incoming calls, we have no safe office to hide in whilst our staff take the brunt of our latest madcap idea or inevitable price rises. We must choose our words with care and honesty and build the trust with those who we network with, we may be having a bad day – but they must never know.

There is of course, a positive side to this as well. When we get it right and our latest clients are thanking us for another site made exactly to their specifications or the updates to their social media, carefully worded and skillfully delivered by us. All of their initial wariness is swept away by the gratitude of having something that they can use to showcase their products or services with pride, easily edited by them whenever they choose, a shop front to the whole of the online world.

You can only imagine our disappointment, when a few months or years down the line we find out that their site, their shop front, the pride of their business, has been hacked and destroyed by some faceless online attacker. You see this is a mistake made by many businesses, small and large. They build a site and add more to it; they may add a shop or a gallery, members area, downloads, all manner of exciting things. Then in a few keystrokes it is ruined and must be rebuilt from memory or ancient original backups – the magic lost.

The most frustrating thing about this is it really doesn’t have to happen. Many websites have the ability to be backed up, the programs and plugins in the background updated and made harder for would be attackers. Whilst there is no guarantee that will stop the site being targeted, how wonderful it is to have a backup that can be up again within hours, greeting your customers and showcasing your wares.

Your designer is not looking for a free lunch, the reason that he or she is recommending that you look at maintenance for your site is kind of like an insurance policy. We all have insurance right? You pay every year and you pray that you will never have to claim! A website maintenance program is just like that. Your programs need to be up to date, you may never need that backup copy, however it is an insurance policy that if you are ever the victim of attack, will save the heartache, hassle and expense of having to rebuild your site from scratch. Which would you rather have?

Breaking news: Our backup and maintenance service now starts at £11.99/month – peace of mind now for just under £3 per week! Call us today to find out more. Debayne Web Design – Weaving the Web your Way.