Every website needs a little love and care, is yours getting all it needs to help it truly flourish?
What does a care package mean in respect of a website? We see this as having 4 key areas:
- Your Brand Voice: Is your website still truly reflecting who you are and what you stand for?
- Safety First: Is your site secure, accessible, compliant, and following best practices?
- Getting Seen: Is your website actively helping you reach your marketing goals?
- Running Smoothly: Is your site fast, efficient, and using the latest tech to deliver a great experience?
Every business and website is unique. While the person, team, or agency that originally designed your site may have done a great job, their expertise could well be focused just on the design. However, maintaining and managing a website over time requires a different skill set – one they may not possess – making them less suited for ongoing support and care.
Your Brand Voice
Just like your business evolves, so should your brand’s online presence. While a wholesale change is sometimes needed, more often than not small tweaks can ensure that you’re reflecting the values and practices of your wider business. These naturally evolve over time along with the markets they serve, just as you get a painter to give your buildings a touch-up periodically, your website should do the same.
The latest generation of automated tools can allow you to analyse the content on your website and ensure that it is on-brand and current in ways that a few years ago would not be cost-effective. Don’t just rely on tooling however, as branding can be intensely personal which is where a skilled and experienced design and copywriting team can help out.
Safety, Security, Accessibility, Compliance & Best Practice
If you are currently managing your site yourself, are you confident that you’re on top of the latest security updates needed for your site? When applying those updates, how do you check that you’ve not broken other vital parts of the site?
The time between a security issue being identified and attackers taking advantage of it is reducing. You need to ensure that relevant patches are being applied in a timely manner.
Security is a big picture and so much more than just applying patches. It has to be holistic, taking in every part of the ecosystem from password choices to server configuration and filtering out malicious requests. There are so many ways that someone, or an automated bot, can attack your website and the Internet will take advantage of any weakness you leave.
Navigating the world of online compliance can feel like a whole new language! Do you even know if your site complies with privacy requirements such as GDPR & PECR (Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations) or accessibility rules such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). We speak this language fluently and can provide actionable insights in plain English.
Marketing
Using marketing platforms? You might need to implement and maintain compliance with systems like Microsoft UET (Universal Event Tracking) or Google’s CMP (Consent Management Platform), which are constantly being updated. Staying compliant with marketing platform requirements, like these is essential for data collection, ad performance, and avoiding legal penalties. Continuous monitoring of policy and technical updates is necessary in addition to constantly evolving your choice of where to place your ads and the audiences to target.
Performance & Current Technology
Is your website lightning-fast, especially on mobile? The average load time for a website on a phone is around 9 seconds compared to the 2 seconds average on desktop. There are a number of techniques that can be used to optimise performance for all platforms.
Caching and CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) ensure that the load time is consistently fast for your growing global audience.
Beyond speed, using metrics such as Google’s Core Web Vitals can help to benchmark your visitors’ experience, this is doubly important as these are also used by Google to help rank sites.
Think about making your website do more. On mobile a website can increasingly act as a fully functioning application. Have you considered whether you could use this to help streamline your customer support needs for example?
Does it sound like your website needs a self-care package?
We’ve been in this business for over 25 years and we pride ourselves on providing long-term stable relationships with our clients. Perhaps the greatest testament to this is the volume of clients who have been with us for 10 years or more. Our continued success is based purely on our client’s success.
Building a new website is an expensive and sometimes risky process. We work with you to identify what’s working and what’s not, ensuring you get the most value from your initial investment.
We are all about creating an effective partnership with our clients and, to this end, every agreement has an ongoing care package. That may be as simple as providing the routine security patches for your content management system, or a more comprehensive package including marketing and development retainers. This principle is true regardless of your chosen technical platform.
We’re also the secret weapon for some of the smartest design and marketing agencies! Some amazing designers and marketeers understand that their focus should be on creating a great, high performing, site. They need a safe pair of hands to whom they can entrust the ongoing work, someone to keep their client happy once the site is live. This allows them to focus on their next design or marketing project.
We can work silently in the background or connect directly with the end client. If required, our experienced designers can add that extra polish to make even the most effective websites truly shine.
How do we do it?
Well that all depends but it all begins with a conversation. Let’s discuss your goals and we’ll follow up with an audit to identify the areas needing most attention. Together we’ll create a plan to evolve your website and ensure it continues to be a valuable asset for your business going forward.
