The Website Jobs Worth Paying For

Sunday evenings on the website

An owner spends Sunday evening on the website. A plugin update has broken the gallery, and an hour on support forums has not fixed it.

Meanwhile the services page still lists work the business stopped doing two years ago, and the photographs of recent jobs are still on a phone.

That is the usual pattern. The jobs only the owner can do wait, while the owner's time goes into jobs somebody else does every day.

Sorting the work the other way round costs less than it sounds, and the site improves on both sides.

What only the business can supply

• What you do and, as importantly, what you do not.
• How pricing works, even where exact prices cannot be published.
• The questions customers actually ask, with your real answers.
• Photographs of your work, your premises and your people.
• Reviews, and permission to use customers' names.
• Changes: hours, holidays, new services, people joining and leaving.

The fourth is the one no outside company can do for you. A photographer can be hired for a day, but only the business is there on the day each job is finished.

What takes daily practice

Other jobs depend on knowing how things fail, which comes from watching them fail on many sites.

That covers structure and design that work on phones; hosting, security and updates done with a backup and a way back; certificates and redirects; speed; and the technical side of search.

And the dull one that matters most: making sure form submissions actually arrive, rather than landing in spam or vanishing.

None of these is difficult once known. Each is easy to get wrong the first time, and the first time is usually when an owner tries.

A test for any job

Three tests sort most website work.

First, whether it needs knowledge of the business or knowledge of websites. The first belongs to you; the second to somebody who has it.

Second, how often it is done. A task done twice a year will be done slowly and from scratch each time, by someone who has forgotten the last one.

Third, how it fails. A typo is visible at once. A form that stops sending, or a redirect missed in a move, fails silently for months.

Mistakes that stay quiet

The expensive website mistakes are rarely the visible ones.

A site moved to a new host without its email settings stops delivering form messages. A rebuilt site without redirects loses the search positions its old pages had earned.

A backup that has never been test-restored turns out, on the day it is needed, to be incomplete. A certificate expires on a Saturday.

Each is prevented by routine, and routine is what a business buys when it pays somebody who does this daily.

A worked example

An event planner in Burnaby had a site she maintained herself in the evenings, between events.

The packages page had not changed since 2016, because editing it meant touching a layout that broke whenever text was added. Theme updates had been put off for the same reason.

Her web company rebuilt the packages as plain blocks of text that could be edited without disturbing the design, and took over updates, backups and form delivery.

Her evenings went to what only she could do: writing up each package, and photographing every room once it was set and before the guests arrived.

Where the two meet

Content is shared work. The business supplies the facts, the examples and the answers; a professional turns them into pages that are easy to scan and to find.

Notes on a single sheet, a recorded conversation or a list of the questions customers ask is enough raw material. Polished writing from the owner is not required.

A good web company asks for this material early and specifically, with a list of questions, rather than waiting for finished copy that never arrives.

What cannot be handed over is the knowledge itself.

Edits the business can make safely

Splitting the work does not mean phoning somebody to change the opening hours.

A well-built site lets staff edit text, swap a photograph or add a news item without being able to break the layout.

On WordPress, the editor role allows exactly that: pages and posts can be changed, while plugins, themes and settings stay out of reach.

Ask for that arrangement, and for half an hour of training on it. Whoever builds the site should welcome both.

The cost of an owner's evening

An owner's hour has a price, even when nobody invoices for it. Few owners would do the year-end accounts themselves to save a bookkeeper's fee, and for much the same reasons.

Three evenings spent fixing a gallery cost more than the same fix done in twenty minutes by somebody who has seen the problem before, and the evenings come with no guarantee.

They also come out of the time that would have gone into the content, which is usually where the site was weakest.

What to ask of whoever does it

Paying for the technical work should not mean losing sight of it.

The domain, hosting and Google accounts should be in the business's name, with access you can see. Changes should be explained in plain words, in writing.

Updates should happen on a schedule, with a backup first, and you should be told when something was found and fixed.

And the arrangement should end cleanly: if you ever change web company, the files, the accounts and the logins come with you.

The counter-case

The split is not the same for every business.

A business with a marketing coordinator on staff can take on more of the content side, including posts, simple pages and the Google listing.

A small site that changes twice a year needs less ongoing work than a store adding products every week, and the arrangement can be correspondingly smaller.

The principle holds at any size: the business supplies what only it knows, and the work that needs daily practice goes to people who practise it daily.

Sorting your own list

1. List every website task from the past year.
2. Mark each one as business knowledge or web knowledge.
3. Note how often each is done.
4. Flag anything that fails silently.
5. Hand the flagged and rare tasks to a professional.
6. Ask for an editor login and some training.
7. Spend the saved time on content and photographs.

Step four is the one that decides most of the list, because the jobs that fail silently are the ones whose cost only appears months later.

Deciding how much of the existing site is worth keeping is covered in choosing between a rebuild and a refresh.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.