Does anyone offer JUST website support / maintenance?

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Hi All,

Does anyone offer JUST website support / maintenance?

Is there are market for the service, or do potential customers just use a web design company for support?

Many Thanks,
Andy

 

[Nuno]

There was someone who joined the forum just the other day who does just that. Sorry, can't remember any more.

 

[Faevilangel]

IMHO unless you can get lots of customers then you won't make enough money to make the business viable, most web designers (myself included) do offer support / maintenance contracts for clients who need / request it, but it will depend on what you want from the following (or more).

- backups
- website edits
- hosting

Your best bet is to find someone who specialises in the software (if any) that your website works on, this will (hopefully) make sure you get someone who knows how to work with your site.

I have customers who do all or some of the above, some just want regular backups of the site done, some want some help making edits to the website (they pay for XX hours per week / month) or they just want to move their hosting.

 

[quikshop]

Yes! Try Steve at www.web-updater.co.uk, he has looked after a couple of my web sites for 18 months now and always quick to respond to requests.

 

[Charleswilmott]

What type website are you using?
What type of website is it?

Agency or commerce?

 

[FreeRangeWeb]

Many people out there have old websites and want them updated. There are many problems with this. Many are designed using old software or bespoke CMS systems which you would have to figure out. 9 times out of 10 they are almost invisible on Google and the design is not responsive (doesn't resize to fit mobiles and tablets).
Our maintenance work comes from existing customers, but new clients most times require a complete redesign.
Having said that, offering website fixes sounds less expensive and could be a good way in to SMEs

 

[avecSys]

We offer this service, but tend to offer it on the back of building the original site just for SEO purposes. You don't really want to be offering support to a website you haven't yourself constructed

 

[Squantrill]

My company offers remote systems administration mainly to linux servers. We also look at web servers (Apache, wordpress etc) systems admin is our speciality. We do however no web design.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[Sober Media]

Hi Andy,

I have been working for Sober Media for 7 years now and this is all we do.

We have a range of clients and look after them on a monthly basis. We also cater for one off requests and 90% of our customers have been let down by a previous developer/web design company. They come to us to troubleshoot and solve existing issues and also make improvements.

We did do web design but after been approach by so many disgruntled potential clients we slowly found our business moving towards maintenance and support.

So in our case there is a demand and every business owner should consider ongoing maintenance.

Cheers

Matt.

 

[Getextra]

We offer this service, but tend to offer it on the back of building the original site just for SEO purposes. You don't really want to be offering support to a website you haven't yourself constructed

This would be my thought as well, we have been given a couple of Magento sites to look after and the amount of hacks done on the core code provided no end of issues. You also tend to get these after the issues have started.

 

[Sober Media]

Completely agree Getextra, it can be a nightmare having to deal with custom code hacks and trying to understand what the previous developer did, but its our passion to solving these problems an get the clients website back to a stable condition.

So if you want to delve into website maintenance understand it can and probably will be a headache but one we enjoy!

Matt.