The Quick Way to Evaluate Ongoing Website Costs
When you buy a website, it is hard to know what you are buying. Why does one supplier charge more than another? Particularly, why are there ongoing costs involved in building a website?
Consider buying a mobile phone: you purchase the phone upfront, and unless you just want a clock and phone book you pay an ongoing service to the network so your mobile is useful. In the same way, we operate our service on a subscription basis since we believe it gives the most effective websites over the long term.
Hosting:
Hosting is the one ongoing cost you'll definitely need to pay. It is storing your website on a computer (server) which is permanently connected to the Internet. This means that people can get to your website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Reliable hosting is important. If the server is often unavailable it will prevent people from seeing your website and affect your search engine ranking.
Your hosting service should include email accounts for your business. You should also insist on getting statistics and performance reporting which are vital to getting feedback on your site as a business tool.
- Is anyone visiting your site?
- Where are they coming from?
- What are they doing once they are on your site?
We include hosting as part of all our accounts. This helps us get your site up and running as quickly as possible and provides ongoing technical support.
Software & Upgrades:
Our sites are all built with a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS means that you can add pictures, pages and text without any further charge. If you would prefer us to do it we can provide this service as well. You can find out more about our CMS in this article, Why Your Website Needs a Content Management System.
CMS Software is upgraded as part of the mcWebs service, keeping it up to date as website technology evolves. We are able to do this because we use open source software, which is continually tested and developed by thousands of web developers across the world. You won't have to buy an additional license down the track, and you can easily add features to your website over time since your software is the latest version.
Ongoing Maintenance:
Every browser behaves differently. As new browsers are released, poorly planned websites can become broken and hard for people to use. As part of the service we make sure your website displays correctly on all popular browsers both current and future as they are released.
The problem of website features that break can include Contact Forms where the responses have disappeared, never to be seen again (along with the prospective clients) or Shopping Carts where the checkout didn't work. Lost enquires and lost sales can add up to a lot of missed opportunities and customers. Our service is designed to ensure that all parts of your site will continue to work, not only on day one but on day 1000+.
Ongoing Support:
A "fire and forget" website, where the website is launched and never thought of again, is only going to have limited (if any) success.
We offer ongoing access to our expertise in technical, copy writing, graphic and marketing to help you get the most out of your website. We will offer you recoomendations on how to...
- Get more visitors who stay longer.
- Add features that will increase website effectiveness.
Our guarantee means that you are not locked in. If you are unhappy with our service you are free to move on.
Not everyone is looking for this kind of comprehensive maintenance service for their website. We do it this way because we believe it delivers the most effective website in the long term.
To hear first-hand from some of our clients who use a CMS and love it, read some of our customer testimonials.
