Taking control of our website

[Nathan Williams]

Hey,

We have a website managed by a third party web dev company.

Though they do use a symfony based text editor it is becoming increasingly apparent that there isn't a lot that can be edited through it. This is resulting in mounting development costs, even for minor changes.

I'm not exactly how sure to word this so bear with me...

How difficult would it be to take control of our website completely? So that only our IT can make changes and so that we do not have to pay for development costs and all of that can be done in house?

Is it a matter of simply getting all the files off them then hosting ourselves?

I really have no idea where you would start with this, any input or experiences are welcome.

 

[edmondscommerce]

You need to get all the files and database

You need to take control of your domain name

Then you need to set up a copy of hte site on your own hosting provider and finally update DNS so that your domainname.tld points to your new hosting.

At that point you are completely in control.

We would be happy to help with this, just get in touch

 

[Nathan Williams]

Thanks for the succinct info Joseph, I need read through our contract and discuss with my colleagues first. Hopefully I will be in touch in the due course.

 

[edmondscommerce]

I tend to advise people in this scenario to ask their current providers for a backup of the site and database

perfectly reasonable thing to ask for and does not mean you intend to jump ship

the provider should be more than happy to provide this as a download or put it into dropbox or similar for you

 

[FSIvan]

Not meaning to be flippant but if you have an IT department they should be able to research and take care of the process quite comfortably.

 

[Nathan Williams]

Not meaning to be flippant but if you have an IT department they should be able to research and take care of the process quite comfortably.

Haha, this is the IT department researching and attempting to take care of the process.

 

[edmondscommerce]

Hate it when people shoot down other people asking perfectly reasonable questions on a public forum designed to allow people to ask people questions.

 

[fisicx]

However...

If the site uses a bespoke platform you won't be able to take control and manage it yourself. The dev company may well not allow you to export to a new host.

If you can get the database and all the files then you may be able to import to a commercially available platform. But it may be quicker and cheaper to simply recreate the site using the data rather than the database.

 

[edmondscommerce]

OP mentioned symfony which I am guessing is a reference to this PHP framework:

http://symfony.com/

In which case it just needs fairly standard LAMP hosting unless they have something particularly special going on

 

[makeusvisible]

It very much depends on how complex your website is and what it does, but one option may be to convert your site onto a more content managed system such as Wordpress. I couldn't confirm without seeing the site first... but if it is feasible the up-front costs may only be a few hundred pounds, leaving you with a very easy to manage website.

 

[ryandeveloper]

Get a copy of your website up and running, (have fun importing the database if you don't know how). Symfony is a PHP framework, it would take hardly any time for someone to make the site easily editable for users. It's main purpose (Symfony) is to provide an easy to develop platform to create rapid changes to a web application running with it. It would be an easy task for any developer that uses this framework to update it for you.

 

[Nathan Williams]

For anyone interested the site is: cegx.co.uk

 

[fisicx]

You could extract the content of the site and import to wordpress in a day or two.

wordpress is free. You may have to pay someone to create a theme for you but this isn't that expensive. If you then do all the content import yourself the total cost will be reasonably low.

You will then have full control over everything.

 

[ryandeveloper]

I'd say the most time consuming part of developing your website would be the overall design itself, as for the inner workings. A couple of routes (name of links on your site, when coded in PHP for a framework mixed with htaccess), a standard coded template, a couple of conditional statements, a cart plugin and a typical registration with a dashboard for authenticated users adapted to your specific site. It's far from rocket-science and should be easy for any capable developer to allow you to edit content easily from a backend on your website. Check out Symfony Administration bundles, Authentication bundles and shopping carts. Other than a main layout and some additional scripts your site is easy to modify unless there's more technology that I can't see behind the scenes that is.

Why don't you try to get the database? It's the safest bet because the website is just a frontend to the database content and some static data. Aslong as you have that, you can try and get control over everything else but atleast with the database you're half way there

 

[E21MEDIA]

Hey,

We have a website managed by a third party web dev company.

Though they do use a symfony based text editor it is becoming increasingly apparent that there isn't a lot that can be edited through it. This is resulting in mounting development costs, even for minor changes.

I'm not exactly how sure to word this so bear with me...

How difficult would it be to take control of our website completely? So that only our IT can make changes and so that we do not have to pay for development costs and all of that can be done in house?

Is it a matter of simply getting all the files off them then hosting ourselves?

I really have no idea where you would start with this, any input or experiences are welcome.

If you want to do it yourself, then the symfony website should be your starting resource. Migrating a LAMP stack like Symfony should be painless. Something like:

Download all the files in server A httpdocs or whatever directory they live
export the database from server A phpmyadmin
upload all source files into server B root directory, public_html
create a Database and a new database user in server B, import the database into this new database
change configs into new database information

if you need a hand let me know.

 

[fisicx]

I suspect the problem is they don't have access to the server.

 

[herodigital]

I would be concerned about technical issues and downtime. After all, there is a reason why you pay somebody for their expertise, so unless you understand the ins and outs of migrating a site to a new server and then performing ongoing maintenance, you might want to think twice about pulling the plug.

My advice would be to find a good freelancer, or a lower-cost agency, to take over management of the site.

 

[Metalfrogboss]

Hate it when people shoot down other people asking perfectly reasonable questions on a public forum designed to allow people to ask people questions.

Good call. Well said!

 

[Metalfrogboss]

I would be concerned about technical issues and downtime. After all, there is a reason why you pay somebody for their expertise, so unless you understand the ins and outs of migrating a site to a new server and then performing ongoing maintenance, you might want to think twice about pulling the plug.

My advice would be to find a good freelancer, or a lower-cost agency, to take over management of the site.

IMO, a freelancer is a bad idea. Why? I hear you ask. Simply, you are putting the website in the hands of one person. Effectively putting your business marketing/business in their hands too! What happens if they fall under a bus? Fall ill?
We have a system where we have backup members for our dev team in the event one is off and this is costly but has proven invaluable in securing professional contracts with clients who understand the value of their website to their business.
If you provider is good, then there is no such thing as downtime. Everything is managed perfectly.