The benefits of website maintenance are measurable and are being proven daily by successful websites. These days it’s impossible to make a profit from your website if it doesn’t constantly feature fresh content. If you own an online shop, you should be adding new products or featuring different products with promotions. If you have knowledge to share with the community, you should be writing periodic blog posts or e-mail newsletters. Every website is different and requires a different type of maintenance. However, all websites do have one thing in common – if they aren’t updated with fresh content….they will FAIL!

Now the tricky decision is whether you need to hire a full-time in-house webmaster, delegate the new duties to current employees, or outsource the maintenance work to an experienced web development company.

Issues with In-House Website Maintenance

Training and Employee Retention

If you choose one of the first two options, you will need to either train current employees, or be sure to hire a qualified website expert. Both of these options can be expensive, and time-consuming. Also, when employees eventually leave your company, the process starts over and you need to train new employees. You may think that maintaining a website is simple, but without knowledge of multiple coding languages, how to develop with support for all browsers and operating systems, and the proper design skills….simple updates can become very complex and cause delays.

Fluctuating Levels of Work

Once your employees get used to managing your website, will they be able to handle increases or decreases in the level of work required? What if the website crashes? Or your database gets hacked? Will your employees have the time and knowledge to quickly take care of these issues?

Hardware and Software Costs

I have thousands invested in the necessary hardware and graphics software enabling me to design, market, and manage websites on a daily basis. Even if your systems are capable of testing and deploying new content to the website, do you have the software necessary to make these changes? Adobe CS4 alone costs $2,499, not to mention the time it takes to learn how to use these programs.

Staying Current with Trends and Technologies

This is by far the most important issue with in-house website maintenance. When employees are updating the website as a side project, they can’t dedicate their time to learning all about the internet. When your website isn’t treated as a high priority, the content and updates you publish won’t be high quality either. When you outsource your website maintenance tasks to a web development company, you know they will be staying current with market trends and technologies. It’s their job. It’s their focus. And the work they produce leads to stronger results for your business.