Site Maintenance

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, you use the WordPress dashboard, accessible from any computer or device with an internet browser, to work on your site.

We provide you with instructions (by phone or MS Word doc) on how to use WordPress and you are welcome to email us with questions. Plus, with WordPress being as popular as it is, there are scads of how-to articles on the internet.

If you need help with complicated updates or technical support, we are here for you. Our hourly rate depends on the complexity of the task and please note that we charge in full hours.

There is no fee to WordPress for their software, unless you wish your site to be built on the WordPress.com platform where your plan fee includes hosting as well as site maintenance and security.

For “self-hosted” sites (those hosted on a third-party web host such as Bluehost or SiteGround), your site 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 our 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 40% 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 my 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.
  • 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!
  • Because the core WordPress program is rather basic in functionality, various plugins are needed to add desired features. But 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 plugins. And not all plugins play nice with each other.