Should you manage your own website?

Websites are supposed to be dynamic. This means they need to be updated. Which means someone needs to manage them. The question is, is that person you?

Let’s take a look at a fictional website for a fictional client of mine called Acme Engineering. Acme is a small company and they’re tired of paying me to manage their website. So they’ve decided to manage it themselves. Here’s what they need to do:

Hosting - Unless you’re a big organization with your own IT department, you should get someone else to host your website. They’ll make sure your site stays live and your emails work. All you’ll need to do is make sure you know who to call when something stops working. Currently Mr. Acme calls me, even over weekends. I guess he’ll have to start calling someone else from now on.
Content updates - Remember what I said about the web being dynamic? Good. That’s why I insist Acme Engineering update their website with new content regularly. Adding content gives search engines and human visitors a reason to keep visiting their website. Lucky for the guys at Acme, I built their website on the WordPress blogging platform, so they can easily log in to their own admin panel and add/remove/change content as they please. Of course, they don’t know anything about HTML or CSS so the quality of their presentation may take a bit of a beating.
Graphic design - To keep Acme Engineering happy, I generally try to over-deliver. When they send through new content, I find relevant stock photographs and graphics to add to their text, just to make things look a bit more professional. I also make sure I optimize all my images for the web. And if I’m using photographs supplied by the client, I spend a few minutes cropping, adjusting levels and sharpening the image to make it look more professional. So if they want to do this bit themselves, someone at Acme is going to need to learn how to use Photoshop or something similar.
Search Engine Optimization - My theory on on-pags SEO is simple: you can make a web page search engine friendly buy following web standards and writing your content around a few keywords. That’s why I make sure every page Acme sends me is carefully edited. Other than correcting obvious spelling and grammatical errors, I try to identify keywords and work them into the web page’s meta tags. This is something I do automatically on all my websites because I believe it’s important. As long as Mr. Acme spends a bit more time spell checking his emails before he sends them to me, he’ll probably get the hang of basic SEO within a couple of months.
Site Statistics - I’ve signed Acme up for a Google Analytics account. I love the Google Analytics interface. It’s easy to understand and has way more features than I need. The good news is Google Analytics is free. All Acme need to do is open their own account and start tracking. Of course, they don’t know HTML, so it’ll take them a few minutes to figure out where to put the tracking code.
Site backups - Even though I love the Web, I still don’t trust it. So I make backups of every one of my client websites every month. I keep the backups safe and send a copy to the client a few times a year, just in case I get run over by a bus. Acme Engineering are using a WordPress install as a Content Management System, so they’re going to need to backup both their website files via FTP and their database files using phpmyadmin. As long as they remember to do it every month, they’ll be fine.
Miscellaneous stuff - Of course there are a few other things I do for Acme that they’ll miss. I helped them set up an email campaign. I publish their email newsletter for them every month, but there are a number of excellent products out there to help them do it themselves. I also helped them find a great print designer last year and I worked with the designer to make sure all Acme’s marketing materials looked the same. And just last week I gave them some great ideas to increase website traffic by over 15% a month.

You know, when you write it all down, there sure are a lot of things needed to manage an online business. It’s almost worth paying me a couple of hundred Dollars a month to handle it all behind the scenes, isn’t it?

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