Website Maintenance

Related Topics

DCS Maintenance Pricing

Content Management
Systems

Frequently Asked
Questions

 

Search engines love change! Pages that change regularly tend to be ranked higher in search engine results.

This is one reason why Blogs and RSS news feeds have become so popular. Every new entry is essentially an update to your web page.

By performing regular updates to your website content, you'll achieve a double impact on your traffic: The higher search engine ranking will make it easier for new customers to find you, and; existing customers have an added reason to keep coming back.

DCS Maintenance Pricing

At DCS Websites, we strive to keep things simple. A perfect example is the pricing of our maintenance services. We charge a flat rate of $50 per hour for all website maintenance activities. And, if you exceed six hours of billable time during any single quarter, the excess time is billed at just $40 per hour.

Of course, if you plan on making major changes to your website, give us a call and we'd be glad to provide you with a firm, fixed-price quote on your project for even greater savings.

Content Management Systems

As a small business specialist, we're used to working with owners and managers who are, by their very nature, both resourceful and frugal. Often, as a way to keep maintenance costs as low as possible, they ask about the possiblity of performing website updates themselves. After all, they're usually fairly eperienced with a PC, and have been using Word and/or Publisher to create their own documents for years.

However, updating a web page is not like updating a word processing document. In order to edit the webpage, you need to have a program that understands HTML code - the language that web pages are written in. To see what HTML code looks like, use your browsers View Source command.

However, if self-maintenance is a requirement, the website can be designed to incorporate a "Content Management System" (CMS). A CMS is a software program that must be integrated into your website during construction. If you'd like a full explanation of how the CMS works, give us a call - it's a little too technical to include the details here. Below is a list of some of the advantages and disadvantages associated with Content Management Systems:

• Authorized users can login to their website control panel to make changes to the content on their web pages.
• Pages can be edited in a manner that is similar to MS Word.
• New pages can be added to a site, and all navigation updated automatically.
• Website must be designed (or rebuilt) from scratch to use a CMS.
• Advanced techniques can be difficult to learn.
• Bottom line: Up-front costs to build the site are higher. Monthly hosting costs are higher. On-going maintenance costs should be lower, or be eliminated. Consider the frequency of website changes carefully, otherwise the return on investment can be very long.