Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, some thoughts about what it takes to keep your organization's website running smoothly (and what you want to avoid).

---

Want links to recent emails or a sign-up link to share? Go to The Digital Landscape sign-up page​

---

4 Website Maintenance Scenarios

In my experience, nonprofit orgs fit into one of three scenarios when it comes to website management. (And I guess the same applies to consultants, which I know some of you are too.)

1. You pay a professional to maintain your website
2. Someone on your team with professional expertise maintains the website
3. Someone on your team WITHOUT professional expertise maintains the website
4. No-one is specifically charged with maintaining the website

Let’s look at the risk profiles and costs associated with these scenarios:

Scenario 1

You outsource all the worry and responsibility of website maintenance to a skilled professional, in exchange for regular payments. If that professional is doing their job well, you are shielded from the vast majority of the risks that come with operating a website and you can go about the rest of your work knowing the website is in good hands.

Scenario 2

A team member has website management as an explicit part of their job description, putting you in a similar position to Scenario 1 (assuming you vetted this hire well). You have a professional in charge of the site, and that person is embedded in your team so you get even more of their attention than you do when you have an external vendor holding this responsibility. And as with Scenario 1, this comes with regular costs, in the form of salary and benefits.

Scenario 3

A team member holds responsibility for maintaining the website, but they don’t have much or any professional training or experience and are doing their best, alongside many other responsibilities. This is common in small to mid-sized nonprofits, where a “Communications Manager” type role ends up as the de-facto “website person”, with little support for taking on that responsibility.

In this scenario, the organization avoids the cost of compensating a professional (either a vendor or a more experienced staffer) for website maintenance, and as a consequence, is exposed to significant risk of a website that doesn’t get the attention it needs. And if something bad happens (see below), the organization faces significant one-time costs of urgently remediating whatever the incident is, coupled with the delay associated with finding a vendor who can provide that urgent support.

Scenario 4

If you haven’t guessed it by now, this is the worst option. No-one is really responsible for the website. In this situation, there are no regular costs related to maintenance, and the risk profile is even worse because no-one is regularly installing updates or checking on the website content. As with scenario 3, if something bad happens, the organization faces significant one-time costs of urgently remediating whatever the incident is, coupled with the delay associated with finding a vendor who can provide that urgent support.

What’s my role in all this?

I got thinking about this because my wonderful spouse commented recently – while we were walking the dog – that much of my work is invisible to my clients.

I’d recently had an unexpectedly busy day tackling an issue that came up and threatened multiple websites that I manage – I’d had to throw my plans out the window and spend the whole day digging into this issue.

And because I’m the professional vendor in Scenario 1 for these clients, they never realized that there was any risk to their websites.

Here’s the thing: When a client asks to work with me on a website maintenance and support plan, I do that work behind the scenes, keeping the website running smoothly, and they don’t hear much about what I’m doing. That’s kind of the point. They don’t have to worry about it.

My work means that in a variety of potential bad things DON’T HAPPEN.

All of this can make the service tricky to sell! Typically, most clients that sign up for this “Scenario 1” service have had an experience in the past where they were in a “Scenario 3 or 4” situation where something bad happened, leading them to realize that the investment in maintenance is worthwhile…

Bad Website Things

Here are a few examples of bad website things that I’ve helped clients avoid in the last couple of months. All things that those clients probably didn’t realize were risks, because they were handled in the background.

You might notice a similarity: all of them would present as sudden, unpleasant surprises if you didn’t have professional website support 😬

One day, out of the blue, your organizational website just displays an error message across the entire site. It just won’t load. Imagine if your organization was a brick-and-mortar, physical building that your clients are used to visiting, and one day they showed up and your offices had just disappeared, with no indication of when they might return. That’s what happens when your website hosting company has an outage that takes your website offline. This happens, particularly when you use cheap shared hosting and another site owner starts doing something stupid that consumes more than their share of server resources.

One day, out of the blue, the layout of your website header breaks suddenly. Your organizational logo is tiny and the menu items are halfway off the screen. What happened?? You have no idea. The answer: Squarespace changed how its template files are structured and that custom code that someone added three years ago no longer targets the right classes. Squarespace made an announcement about this breaking change, but no-one knew it applied to your site.

One day, out of the blue, you can no longer log in to your website administrator account. The email address and password associated with your username have been changed. And then you see spam blog posts being published, and your homepage being taken over with casino ads (or worse). This happened because that plugin someone installed five years ago is no longer being maintained, and someone hacked it such that last time you clicked that Update All Plugins button, you unknowingly added a backdoor to your website that allowed invisible attackers to compromise administrator-level accounts.

What next?

This was just a reflection on the work I do for my clients, prompted by my wonderful spouse’s comment while we were walking the dog.

It got me thinking about whether I should share more with my clients about the bad things I’ve avoided on their behalf. Maybe? But also the ability to tune those website worries out is part of what they’re paying me for.

And if you’re in the Scenario 3 or 4 situations, think carefully about whether the cost savings are worth it. What would you do if one of those bad website things examples I described above landed on your desk in the middle of an already busy workday? There are thousands of well qualified website support vendors out there. Take a look and thing about whether it’s worth protecting your website – an incredibly valuable asset – with some professional care!

---