Over the years, I’ve had several clients who decided after they’d been paying me for a while to manage their websites, and keep tabs on the hosting details, technical management, and the overall design and function of their sites, to go it alone with a different hosting company. This isn’t unheard of, and it probably is a ‘cheaper’ option for those who have time they want to spend on their website, but most don’t. Since I’ve had several clients call me about taking back their websites recently, I thought I’d offer some insight as to why you really want to hire a webmaster and stick with their program.
While your web master most likely does all the technical service associated with your site, and may help you with details like email, auto-responders, and updating the technical side of your website, they do so much more than JUST technical management…
Even though you can probably do all those things, do you know how much time those things really do require?
What about fixing that blog post you just set up, the one with the lopsided picture you can’t seem to fix? Who are you going to call about that?
And the new page you want to add to your website? You know where to put it, but you really would like a different shape to the page, maybe take off those border columns, remove the footer, and ‘can you give it a different header’?
Is your SEO program working for you? Do you need more SEO? What is a backlink? Can you fix the links on your site? Do you remember how to do a link behind a graphic element? And isn’t there some way to put a background in this website, without changing the whole thing?
Of course, you can YouTube a how-to and learn how to do all this yourself, or cousin Eddie needs a job, and you could hire him to do all this, but…
1. Keeping up with contracts, hosting, and domain details is time consuming and if you forget to pay one, with most hosting companies, your site is GONE. Not just offline, but GONE when you miss a single payment by five days.
2. Managing the technical details of your site and getting answers to those significant little questions you want to ask, is easier if you already have a webmaster.
3. If you’re paying a webmaster for regular services, most offer continuous customer discounts for any special services you need, and won’t charge you for the things that ‘come up randomly’ if it’s just a quick fix, or solution.
4. Updates, fixes, and solutions to real problems. Your webmaster will catch a hacker most often, before you catch him/her, because they’re looking for hacker activities around your website. Software may help, but it is not the end all of hacker solutions.
5. Niche development and marketing your website for best results. Your webmaster may be a marketing expert as well as a web master, which would be a great benefit to you. (Enough so, that I would recommend you find one who is.) The result is a professional who understands what you need online and is capable of pulling it together and making it benefit your business.