Website Maintenance Can Be a Chore

 So you've built a fantastic new website and proudly emailed a link to all your clients, job done! Well actually no, job only just begun would be more accurate. Just like most marketing and business acquisition tools your website needs constant monitoring and management to ensure it's aligned with your business objectives. It also needs promoting so it appears in Google searches. However, there are alternatives to hiring a new member of staff or worse, burying your head in the sand. Enter website maintenance services.

How often have you looked at a company's website and seen last years news and pages dedicated to members of staff who are no longer with the company when you try to contact them? Too often is the likely response. The simple fact is, if your website is out of date it's going to put people off doing business with you, it's a huge turn-off to potential customers.

Faced with this dilemma you have several choices:

Force an existing member of staff to do it

Hire a new member of staff to do it

Do it yourself

Use a website maintenance service

Option 1 is a bad idea and it's likely to fail for lots of reasons, only large organisations are likely to be able to afford option 2, option 3 is going to adversely affect your business and this leaves only option 4, unless I've missed something which I don't think I have.

Furthermore, when you consider the skills required to carry out effective website maintenance it's unlikely one person is going to be able to do the work effectively. The required skills include the ability to write effectively, a certain amount of technical knowledge, SEO skills to research keywords, organisational skills and often some design skills, if only to create graphics to compliment new pages of content.

It's pretty obvious finding one person with all the required skills is going to be tough, in fact it's going to be impossible. Better then to hire a company who have all the skills required to make sure your website delivers what's required of it to your business, be that better informed existing clients and new ones.

The author runs Scottish web specialists Red Evolution who offer a range of web related services including website maintenance. They have a number of clients who outsource the entire management of their website including ongoing SEO, the creation of new content and continued research of opportunities and competition analysis.