Website Maintenance

Keeping your website up to date is no easy job - so let us help.

There are several different ways that we can help to keep your website up to date, whether we were the ones who set it up or not.

We are available to work on:

  • static HTML 5 / XHTML websites,
  • content management websites including: Joomla, Wordpress and bespoke packages coded in PHP or ASP.
  • We are also able to provide support for Javascript and JQuery scripts.

There are three main payment methods, hourly rates, quotes and maintenance contracts.

Hourly rates

If your website only needs updating once in a blue moon and the updates are minor then paying by the hour is probably the best method for you. This method usually suits updates to static HTML websites where the required changes are to text or images only.

Our standard hourly rate is just £25.00, with a mimum of 1 hour per update. Charges are then made to the closest half hour of work. Time spent on your project is tracked using online timing resource Toggl which helps us to accurately track the time the update has taken.

An 'estimate' will be given at the start of the project for hourly paid work. If it looks like the work take longer than originally estimated, we will contact you to advise you of your best course of action.

Quotes

For website upgrades we will give you a quote for the work before we start. This will be based upon the number of hours we estimate the work will take. Quotes are best suited to bigger projects where new features are being added to an existing website or where vast amounts of text are being added to a website.

If we give you a quote for the work carried out, this will be the maximum price you will pay for the update unless extra tasks, not mentioned during the quoting process, are requested after the quote has been agreed.

Website Maintenance Contracts

A maintenance contract is an agreement between you and us to provide updates to your website for an agreed period of time - usually a year. Payments are usually made each month during the contract period.

We will usually arrange to meet you in person, or over the phone/skype, to discuss the level of updates required on your website, so that you are not paying for updates you don't need.

At this meeting we will both agree the maximum number of hours work each month the website is likely to require on average and a set monthly fee to help you keep your website up to date.

Benefits of website contracts include

  1. Priority updates over our other clients.
  2. Comparitively lower hourly rates.
  3. Regular back-ups of your site files, including databases.

The agreed monthly amount is payable each month as long as our agreement continues. These agreements are usually for a year at a time, after which both parties can re-evaluate both the fee and the agreed number of hours.

Payments must be made in advance and are for a whole calendar month. Unused updates from a previous month can be carried over to a new month, but this is entirely at our disgression.

Agreements vary from customer to customer, but a standard monthly price for website would be around £100 - which would cover a maximum of 6 hours work over the month. However, contracts can be as low as £50 a month, covering just emergency updates, upgrades and back-ups.

Contracts can be cancelled at any time (unless otherwise stated in our contract agreement), but a minimum of 2 months notice is usually required.

Web Maintenance for Wordpress and Joomla websites

Increasingly we are getting enquiries from customers with existing Wordpress or Joomla websites requesting support in keeping them up to date and backed up.

So we have put together some simple options for you:

  • Quarterly updates - For low maintenance websites with only small changes made, it may only be necessary to back up quarterly and to run updates to plugins and templates sporadically. This would cover a maximum of 2 hours a quarter and would be paid in advance and cost from £40 a quarter.
     
  • Monthly updates - For most websites, where content is updated regularly, we would recommend running updates and back ups at least once a month. This contract would cover up to 4 hours a month (including updating content and photos) and cost £50 a month.
     
  • Weekly updates - Some websites, including e-commerce websites, you may need updates carried out on a weekly basis. This means that in the event of hacking you have a back up at worst a week old and all plugins are up to date helping to prevent future hacks. This kind of contract would start from around £80 a month (including content and photos), covering up to 8 hours a month.

The following packages are an example. We would need to tailor the package to yourselves.