Your website is out of date the moment it goes live. Even when it hits the internet for the first time, you will have written the content weeks back, and from there on in it only gets more and more dated.
Fact is, things change. Products and services. Personnel. Offers. Events. The marketplace. Your competitors’ offerings. Smart businesses know that an effective web presence is about keeping your site bang up to date.
What are the options?
Asking your web agency to update your website is one route. That’s great if you have a decent chunk of changes you need doing and can present them in one go for a cost-effective quote. But if it’s a picture or two, a new paragraph, a change of a few names somewhere, you are never going to get value for money out of an agency.
That’s because a web agency has to receive your request for work, quote on it, add it to their project management system, assign a member of staff, remove the files from their versioning system (a kind of backup of projects that ensures mistakes can be quickly rectified), do the work, put it on a preview domain so you can check it, make any changes for you, put it live, check the live version, replace all the files in the versioning system, and finally bill you.
That’s a lot of work for a quick photo or text change, and the agency is going to have to charge you for it all in order to remain profitable. It’s like the £2 bottle of wine where the bottle itself costs £1.50. (Best going for a carton of wine at this level…)
Wouldn’t it be nice to make simple and effective changes to your website quickly, cheaply and when you want?
Updating your site with a content management system
That’s where a CMS, or “content management system”, can help. A CMS allows you to make changes to your site as and when you wish.
CMSs traditionally have been unwieldy beasts, costing a chunk to have added to your website when it is being built, or prohibitively expensive to fit afterwards. In our experience, they also allow clients to very easily break their sites. Cue frantic call to web agency and the above cycle of invoice – set up project – issue big bill (in this case, all for just fixing what you unwittingly broke).
Getting back to basics with a mini CMS
Fast forward to today, though, and it is possible to have a CMS system that is simple to use, cheap to have, and easy to add to your sites – whether it has been built yet or not. Such CMS systems let you or your staff alter just the content you want, leaving the rest of your site fine, so it’s really hard to break anything.
With this type of “mini-CMS” solution, you get to alter your events, staff, offers, images etc without paying an agency to do so, and so you keep ahead of the competition for very little outlay. Such systems are revolutionising small business websites, and are thoroughly recommended if you find yourself constantly wishing you can change small but important things on your site but holding off for fear of what the bill might be.
Find out more
Like to know how easily and cheaply you could have a CMS fitted to your website? Contact us today for a free consultation and quote.
