You can choose to maintain your site yourself or hire someone else (including us) to maintain your site for you.
With a website designed using WordPress or Wix, you log into the site from any computer or device with an internet browser, in order to work on your site.
We provide you with instructions (MS Word doc or by phone) on how to edit your content and you are welcome to email us with questions. Plus, with WordPress and Wix being as popular as they are, there are many how-to articles and tutorials on the internet.
If you need help with complicated updates or technical support, we are available during standard business hours. Our hourly rate depends on the complexity of the task and please note that we charge in full hours.
If you opt for a self-hosted WordPress site, you pay an annual fee to your hosting provider. However, if you opt for a site built on WordPress.com or Wix.com platform, you pay a plan fee that includes hosting as well as site maintenance and security.
Self-hosted WordPress sites will need periodic updates of the WordPress program as well as the various plugins that are used on your site. You can either run these periodic updates yourself (be sure to backup your site first) or contact us and we can set up a maintenance plan where we handle the updates for you.
We do recommend a yearly site evaluation and maintenance service. Once a year, we go over your site and make any necessary updates to the WordPress program, plugins, and custom theme, as well as optimize the WordPress database and media library.
Advantages of WordPress
- WordPress is the most popular and widely-used content management system, powering 43% of all websites on the internet!
- You don’t need to go through a web designer first to update or create new content on your site, so there’s no wait time on sharing timely news or modifying your site’s content.
- Your site can be maintained from any computer or device with access to an internet browser.
- Multiple individuals in your organization or company can work on the website, with different roles (administrator, editor, author).
- You can easily add text, pictures, and videos to your pages, reorganize your site menu, categorize your blog posts, and with certain themes, you can even change the font styles and colors.
- Establish a dialogue with your followers via a system of blog posts and comments.
- Your blog posts can be picked up by news feeds and commented on in other blogs, thereby increasing your public impact.
- Blog posts can be shared on social media. No need to write the same post on your website and on your Facebook page or Twitter.
- Take a look at our demo sites and client portfolio.
Disadvantages of WordPress
- Unless you have a premium or custom-designed theme, your site can look ho-hum or “bloggy”.
- You need to be careful with free WordPress themes, some of which are poorly-coded or can’t be customized much.
- There is an initial learning curve to working with the WordPress dashboard. We, however, provide complete instructions on how to use WordPress.
- If you choose to have a blog on your site, maintaining the blog can be time-consuming (writing posts, moderating comments, managing users).
- If you don’t have a sense of design, your pages and posts could quickly become a chaotic mess. Go easy on the wild colors and font sizes!
- Since the core WordPress program is rather basic in functionality, various plugins are used to add desired features. These plugins are created by independent developers, and it is up to them to update their plugins. Because of this, it can be necessary at times to swap out obsolete plugins.
- Some plugins conflict with others, which means you need to be careful when adding new plugins. We install plugins we know work well together.