--- title: Tips for Website Maintenance date: 2023-01-17T05:00:00-05:00 author: Amanda Lutz canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-4/tips-for-website-maintenance/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Season 06 Episode 4 – Jan 17, 2023 32:35 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Tips for Website Maintenance  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-06/S06-E04-Website-Maintenance_2023-01-16-190157_kcut.mp3) We talk about website maintenance, tips for planning maintenance, and maintenance contracts. ### Show Notes - What is involved in maintaining a website - Owing a website is a lot like owning a car, a house, or a garden. - Unplanned expenses - Keeping the CMS and server updated - Once click updates - Waiting too long for maintenance could make your site more difficult or impossible to update - Too many plugins - Who, in your organization, is responsible for the website - Pruning users - Workflow and image editing - Backups - offsite backups are important! - Maintenance plans/contracts Be sure to checkout our [Website 101 Podcast YouTube channel](Website%20101%20Podcast%20YouTube%20channel). ### Show Links - [A Website is Like Owning a Car](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/a-website-is-like-owning-a-car/) - [The Dangers of Over Reliance on Plugins in Website Builds](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/the-dangers-of-over-reliance-on-plugins-in-website-builds/) - [Why Website Maintenance is Important](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/why-website-maintenance-is-important/) - [Backup Sheep](https://backupsheep.com/) - [Jetpack Backups (WordPress)](https://wordpress.com/support/restore/) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Mike:** Today on the website 101 Podcasts, we talk about website maintenance and what you should be thinking about, maintenance contracts, and we give you a lot more reasons why you should check out Sean's blog. **\[00:11\]** **Amanda:** Hello listeners, welcome to another episode of the website 101 Podcast. This is the podcast for people who want to learn more about building and maintaining websites. I screwed that up already. **\[00:27\]** **Mike:** And no, it works because of the topic today. **\[00:29\]** **Amanda:** I guess it does work because of the topic. Well, maintaining or man, slash managing websites. Yeah. Anyway, thank you for joining us today. I've got with me talking Mike Mella. **\[00:40\]** **Mike:** Hi. Hi. **\[00:42\]** **Amanda:** How are you doing? **\[00:43\]** **Mike:** I'm good. **\[00:44\]** **Amanda:** How are you? Very well. **\[00:46\]** **Sean:** Excellent. And Sean Smith. Hey, Sean. Hey, Amanda. Happy to be here. Looking forward to the Christmas holidays. And especially getting on to this topic. Managing websites. Yes. **\[00:56\]** **Mike:** Yeah. Managing websites as a general, you know, what's involved in managing websites, what you should be aware of, what you, you know, deserve to have, what features you deserve as a website owner, what you can do with maintenance contracts, all kinds of stuff, right? We're going to cover all that. Exactly. I think a lot of what we talk about today will overlap with a recent episode called choosing a CMS, because I think some of the decisions you make when you're considering maintenance issues are also decisions you make when you're considering a CMS. **\[01:29\]** **Sean:** Yes. **\[01:30\]** **Mike:** 100%. Okay, so what are we talking about when we say website maintenance? What are some of the things people have to consider when they're thinking about what's involved in maintaining their website? **\[01:42\]** **Amanda:** Yeah, because I think that a lot of times, especially small business owners who wear this is like their first rodeo, they don't, you know, everything is new to them. They're just so excited about, yeah, I've got a website online, everything is great. And it's like, okay, what happens on day two after launch? We've got to cover everything about content updates, software updates. If things are working fine for the first month, but then they've got an idea or a new feature that they think might help their business, all of these things need to be considered. **\[02:16\]** **Sean:** Absolutely. So there are a lot of things to consider. owning a website is a lot like owning a car, or as Mike has mentioned in previous episodes, owning a house, you have to plan for ongoing and future unexpected expenses. **\[02:31\]** **Mike:** Well, actually, Sean, you have a blog post about this. I know you do. **\[02:35\]** **Sean:** I do, I do. Tell us about that. It's called a website is a lot like owning a car, just like I said. There we go. I've mentioned it in previous episodes of the podcast as well, and we'll include a link to it in the show now. But basically, it's like, you buy your car, you need to get oil changes, you need to change the tires, something could break, unexpected expenses also. It's the same thing with your website. You could have a budget website if it meets your needs. Great. If you need something full on that's bespoke and got a lot of custom functionality like you're driving a Bugatti or some sports car or something, you're going to pay a lot more. So there is a range in what you get, but every website needs regular maintenance, regular planning for regular things that happen as well as unexpected. Speaking of unexpected things, I went into my backyard this afternoon and I noticed that my eavesdrop had fallen off my roof during the last wind storm. So I got some unexpected maintenance to do in the spring. **\[03:50\]** **Mike:** Owning a house is like owning a website. It was a little surprising. Yeah, I would actually say that there's also the opposite problem where a lot of people who are building a website, often they put out a big RFP or whatever and they say, we're going to spend 40 grand on redesign or something, they go through all this work, they do it, they launch it, and they kind of subconsciously perhaps just say, all right, it's done, you know, we'll just post the odd news article every few weeks, and in five years we'll do this all again. And in five years we'll do this all again. And you should not be doing that. You should be treating your website like a garden, maintaining it and pruning it and keeping it up to date, keep it alive. Exactly. So you should do that. **\[04:39\]** **Sean:** done is not the way to go although it might feel good in the moment later on **\[04:43\]** **Amanda:** you'll regret it. Right absolutely. Yeah I often like to use the analogy that I **\[04:47\]** **Mike:** don't have one I just didn't want to be left out. Mm-hmm good. I was hoping you'd come up with one on the fly but maybe I can splice one in and anything. Maybe you'll have one. Yeah later on. Yeah exactly you might have one. I'll put it on. Hey listeners do you have an analogy **\[05:04\]** **Amanda:** that you like to try to pigeonhole into like absolutely everything that happens in your life? Let us know in the comments. Yeah, right. **\[05:11\]** **Sean:** Absolutely. That'd be great. **\[05:14\]** **Mike:** OK, so let's talk about what things someone who owns a website should be considering. What are some questions they need to ask about getting ready to maintain their site? What are some things they should think about? **\[05:29\]** **Sean:** Well, the first one would be keeping the software up to date. **\[05:34\]** **Mike:** Right. **\[05:35\]** **Sean:** Are you running a website using a hosted CMS, such as Wix or Webflow, or are you hosting a self-hosted website like Wordpress or Craft or Drupal? Two different things. If it's hosted like Wix or Squarespace, then the maintenance part is taken as part of your contract. They'll keep everything up to date and secure. But if you're running Wordpress or Drupal or Craft CMS or whatever, then it's up to you or your web developer to make sure that all of the security things are up to date, that the server is up to date, and that you're ready to go for the future. **\[06:19\]** **Amanda:** I have a maintenance plan that I offer my WordPress clients just because, like, it's kind of a catch-22. Everybody knows about WordPress because it's free. And so therefore, everybody uses WordPress because everybody knows about it. And that means that there's so many people that are on it. But then because of that, that means that if anybody, if any hackers are out there, and if they want to get into something to try to get as many sites infected as possible, they're gonna go after something popular, which means they're gonna go after WordPress sites. Like it just, it keeps like, it's cyclical. It just keeps building off of each other. So for the last many years, actually, I've had a few clients who I just do like quarterly updates. You know, I back up the database, I update the software and all the plugins, make sure everything's working fine. And then if anything were to happen because they're kind of using low-level shared hosting, if anything happens, we've got the backup, we can restore everything really quickly and it just gives them a little extra peace of mind **\[07:19\]** **Sean:** throughout the year. Absolutely. I would like to add that it's not just WordPress that needs to do that. No, of course not. Although the part about WordPress being a target because it's the most popular is true, I also offer maintenance plans to my clients than I don't have any WordPress clients. And it's also done quarterly. And speaking of that, I have two of them to do this week. So. End of year. Yeah, two sites will be getting updated to the latest version of craft and getting prepared to migrate to a new server, the following update. **\[07:51\]** **Mike:** Yeah, so no matter what tools you're using, you're gonna need to keep them up to date. There's nothing worse than opening up the control panel and see like 10 months of updates that have not been run. Because even if you have one of those like one click update buttons, I try not to rely on that stuff because you can sometimes click that button and you still get some error. And what do you do then, like, what's where do you go from there? And the longer you let updates go without addressing them, the more likely you'll encounter a problem like that. **\[08:24\]** **Sean:** Yeah, Molly, I'm not scared when I'm doing a regular update. I get really nervous if I've got a site that hasn't been updated in over a year though, just because you could have weird incompatibilities. **\[08:36\]** **Amanda:** I recently was sort of past, a project was passed to me and one of the tasks is everything needs to be updated and like the message at the top is like, like the version of the CMS is so old that you need to update to this version before we can give you the complete list of all of the update. It's so old, I didn't need to do it in installments in chunks. **\[09:01\]** **Sean:** If it's not just a point release when that happens, but a full major version, it can be even more daunting or sometimes even impossible. **\[09:11\]** **Mike:** Yeah. We should add for people who aren't sort of technical about this thing. It's not always just a matter of clicking that button and updating it. You could encounter a problem where the software that the hosting company is running that your or website lives on or works on, is itself not capable of running your new CMS. So PHP, MySQL, various things like that, have to be of a certain version in order to run certain software so you might encounter a problem where, even if you try to update your CMS, it complains and says, I can't do this because the host is not letting me. **\[09:47\]** **Sean:** And that's actually hooks back into what I said about those two updates that I'm doing this week. we're gonna be preparing for a server migration because the following update is gonna be moving from craft three to craft four and the current server is not gonna, yeah, it's PHP eight and my SQL is 8.0. **\[10:07\]** **Mike:** Yeah. **\[10:08\]** **Amanda:** I think oftentimes too many people depend to heavily on additional plugins. Oh, well, just plugins to do absolutely everything and sometimes if the plugin was like, like plugins are just created by regular people who still have everyday jobs. the majority of the time. And if somebody is like, well, nuts to this, I'm not gonna maintain this anymore. I'm not gonna update it. It's suddenly this plugin that maybe your site is relying on is no longer useful on like an updated version of the CMS. And then like, do you leave it at the old version? Do you completely revamp it? It's a big decision. **\[10:42\]** **Sean:** And I have a, coincidentally, I have another blog article I wrote called The Overreliance on Plugins, which I'll link to in the show notes. **\[10:49\]** **Mike:** Yes, and you did mention this in several episodes. Yeah, even on that choosing a CMS episode recently, we went into plugins as well, that's right. So, regarding getting aside from the technical side, in terms of people actually managing their site, I think one of the things that has to be asked is, who is it in your company or your organization that will be doing the updates? Do you have, is it one person? Is it a marketing team and you might have five different people who need to log in, things like that, because you need to consider that kind of thing when it comes to what your CMS is. Does it allow multiple log ins, all that kind of thing? So in terms of managing content, ask that, ask what they need to be able to do. Is so-and-so just going to just be posting news articles once in a while, or do they need to be able to manage user permissions and stuff like that. **\[11:47\]** **Sean:** That could go so far as to being pruning users who have left the organization. So if somebody quit their job or they got fired or whatever, even if it's on good terms, you don't want them having access to the server. So you would delete the user or remove their permissions so they no longer have access to change things. That should be part of your regular maintenance as well. **\[12:10\]** **Mike:** Agreed. Totally. I wanted to talk a little bit about features of content management systems that you may or may not have, or even be aware of, that could really help you when you're maintaining your site. So, one of them that I know all the three of us like very much, a feature is called Live Preview. It's available in, I can think of at least three CMSs that have this feature, just in short, you click Preview, you're editing fields that you're filling out appear on the left, and Preview of the whole thing from the front end is on the right and it updates in real time as you make changes So not all CMSs have that But a lot of people really like it because it allows you to you know make a change See what it's gonna look like before you've made it live for your visitors So that that's one example of something you might want to think about when when you're doing your maintenance **\[13:01\]** **Sean:** Absolutely, I think I think that's a really really powerful feature Especially if it allows you to send kind of a secret link to people to to view approval. So you could be the content editor, but you might need approval from somebody in the C-suite to publish it. So you type it all up. You send them a secret URL that's not visible to anybody who doesn't have it and boom they can say yes or no or you know make this change. **\[13:29\]** **Mike:** Yeah drafting that's in that overlaps with drafting as well. If you want to make a draft of an article yeah do you have that workflow where you have to get approval or sign off or whatever or is that part of how you maintain your website? Then think about that and make sure your CMS allows you to do that. **\[13:48\]** **Sean:** Another good one would be having an image editor built into the site, do you need one? If you're comfortable using Photoshop or other image editing software, great, do that. But maybe not everybody is or not everybody has access to that. Then simple editing features built into the CMS such as cropping or adding certain filters might be important to you. **\[14:13\]** **Mike:** Yeah, if that's something you do when you manage your website, if you need to be able to manipulate images, then yeah, that's another thing to consider for sure. And WordPress has, of course, a reputation for this kitchen sink style, the site builders, a divvy, elementer where you've got dozens and dozens of components You can kind of drop in. Some people who manage websites really want to get their hands dirty in that sense, they want to kind of like, if I wake up and I want to put a slide carousel on this page, I want to be able to do that. WordPress would be a good example of a CMS that might let you do that. It does have drawbacks, which we've mentioned many times. Maybe we won't go into, but something to consider. **\[14:58\]** **Amanda:** I had a client and I made a WordPress site for them, and with the intent that they We could do all of these updates themselves, just content updates, because they had a lot of publications that they wanted to put on their site on a regular basis, and yet they still always email them to me. Here, can you put this on the website? And every time it'd be like, it's going to cost you, you have a content management system. This is your login, and they would just always reply, we don't have time to do it. **\[15:25\]** **Mike:** Yeah, sure. **\[15:26\]** **Amanda:** Using a CMS is obviously the way to go anyway, but why would you have a big B in your bonded about how it has to be an easy to use CMS when you're never going to use it. So I think that's another thing. **\[15:37\]** **Sean:** It's easy for you. **\[15:38\]** **Amanda:** Well, it is easy for me, but that's the point. It's like if you are a business owner, be aware of your time, be aware of what you want to be doing, be aware of your skill set and your desire for like if you're going to actually do these updates yourself or pay someone else to do them. **\[15:55\]** **Mike:** Yeah, this kind of maintenance process workflow is something you really should consider right at the outset, when if you're going through a rebuild or a build of a fresh site or whatever. Yeah, because it does influence the CMS, you use the plugins that you, you know, if you don't need to be able to drop in a store locator plugin and have your web developer build in that functionality because you're never going to do it, then you should be aware of that. **\[16:20\]** **Amanda:** It might save you money. **\[16:22\]** **Mike:** Now Amanda, I think you said earlier about backups or somebody said something about backups. That's a good point. You should make sure that really whatever workflow you have, you have some workable back-up system whereby if something really goes south, you can roll back to a previous version of the site and it's all good. Especially if you're doing your own maintenance without a web developer getting involved because things might break. **\[16:51\]** **Amanda:** Yes. And I would like to point out about backups is that depending on your hosting company, I don't want to say beware, but sort of be outware. Sometimes the hosting company will like offer the service where, oh, we're going to back up your files and back up your database like every month and it's like awesome, great things and then they like charge you extra for it. And the thing is like anything web related is intimidating if you're new and if you don't know what you're doing. even small business owners, like, if this is something that's very important to you, it is something that you can do yourself. You can easily do yourself. I don't know that you want to be paying your hosting company like an extra 10 bucks a month to like basically be doing something automated for you. So I mean, yes, especially trying to like restore everything might be a sort of extra Larry and then maybe you do reach out to a developer to help you with that. But I, I mean, I don't, I don't like paying for stuff. I don't have to pay for it. So I'm always really concerned when clients are like, oh, I'm going to throw them under the bus. GoDaddy. GoDaddy just sent me this email that they're going to free extra amount. And it's just like, no, don't do that. **\[18:03\]** **Sean:** I, however, feel that if you're not technically savvy, paying that extra, let's say it's $10 a month like Amanda suggested, that's only an $120 a year. If you're business depends on it, But that is a small price to pay to ensure your data is safe. One last thing I'd like to add to backing up, if you're relying on C panel backups, which is built into a lot of shared hosting, those backups are not offsite. So if your host server dies or whatever gets hit by a lightning bolt, your data is gone irretrieverably. What you really want is offsite backup. **\[18:42\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I've had that exact situation where I've had a client's hosting company has something they had a meltdown and The backups that they offer for free in the hosting plan were on the same server that the site was and they were also not available Fortunately, I had a redundant backup set up so all was good, but Yeah, it's not as simple as all they offer backups than I'm safe You really got to do your research **\[19:09\]** **Sean:** So there are third-party backup services that you can use. I know that there is a couple with WordPress. I can't remember their name offhand and some unrelated ones that will work with any sort of server backup sheep and a couple others. I'll add them into the show notes. I just can't remember them offhand right now. **\[19:29\]** **Amanda:** Hey listeners, do you like what you hear? You can find us over on youtube.com website 101 podcast. **\[19:46\]** **Mike:** So Amanda, you talked a minute ago about a client who wanted to be able to do everything but then they didn't do everything, they kind of sent everything to you. I have a similar story to that. Okay, so this company was redoing a website for a client, and that company hired me to do it. They subcontracted me, basically. So they gave me like a design brief and whatever, and I did the rebuild, and they said, hey, can you show it to the client? And I said, sure. So I walked them through it. And the first thing they said was, how do I change the logo? And I was like. **\[20:20\]** **Sean:** Wait, wait, they actually said that to you? **\[20:22\]** **Mike:** Of your organization? And they said, yeah. And I said, are you guys going through like a rebrand or something? And they said, no, but if I someday want to change it, how do I do it? And there was no way I hard coded it into the template because it wasn't in the brief that they needed that control. And then he started pointing at different things. How do I change this? How do I change that? What about this footer thing? And he said, I think his exact words were, I need to be able to change every single thing on this website if I want to. And I had to say to him, look, that wasn't In any of the design brief that I was provided, you need to go back to the company that hired me, tell them that, and then they can come back to me, and it will cost a lot more money. This is what I'm getting at, is that it's easy to say, I want to be able to do everything, but it's going to cost you money to have a web developer build that functionality in that lets you do every single thing. **\[21:15\]** **Sean:** Exactly. **\[21:16\]** **Mike:** Yeah. And of course, it introduces all kinds of other problems with plugins and whatever that makes that possible. So it's a good idea to have that conversation, like, what am I going to need to do to maintain this website realistically? Am I going to change my logo every three months? **\[21:31\]** **Sean:** Maybe not. And I would think that any good web developers could make it so that you can change anything that is most likely going to need to be changed, like the main part, the main copy and images and videos of the things. But change in the logo, I don't know anybody that would bake that in off out of the box. **\[21:51\]** **Mike:** Yeah. So do you want to go into maintenance contracts and talk about what those are all about? **\[21:56\]** **Sean:** Yeah, sure. We kind of hit on it a little bit earlier. And I also have yet another article that I'm going to plug on my blog. Why website maintenance is important. So you can go there for a little bit more detail about that. But yeah, maintenance contracts, I hit on it at the top of the show where you just want make sure that everything is going to continue to run smooth, keep yourself up to date. The longer it goes without being updated, the more risk you're carrying of potential problems. **\[22:34\]** **Mike:** Yeah, so I have a few maintenance contracts myself. Shana, I think you do, too. This is an agreement where the client basically pays the developer a certain amount per month or per quarter, and in my case, and I'll speak for myself, they get access to a certain number of hours of my time every month— is how it works. And they get sort of priority sort of seeding in my, you know, if they write me and say, hey, we need this article up on the site, I don't say, okay, I'm working on something else for the next two weeks, but I'll get to it after that. I say, okay, I'll be today or tomorrow, like they're the priority because they're paying me regularly. So that's one benefit of a maintenance contract.— **\[23:15\]** **Sean:** My maintenance, I have two levels on my maintenance contract, a basic and an intermediate level. That implies advanced, but there is no advanced level. It's a like, build your own, which nobody's taking me up on. **\[23:27\]** **Amanda:** Everything about Sean is advanced. **\[23:29\]** **Mike:** I have a feeling, I'm afraid that's going to end up in this share of thought in this episode, eventually. **\[23:38\]** **Sean:** I'm a little bit flustered now. What was I say? Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm sorry. There's another beep for there's a beep for the beep role. So my contracts, I have two levels, basic and intermediate. There's no advance. It's like a build your own. The basic, they get once a quarter, I do a CMS update. They get priority seating like Mike said, and they get a half hour of work per month. So it's a one and half hours over that term. The next level up, they get a reduction on the hourly rate, more hours. I think it's three hours per month and like the highest priority. So they're like at the top. And I have two clients on that on that middle one. **\[24:32\]** **Mike:** Yeah, like chances are you'll be able to find different agreements, I mean even between me and Sean, we have different sort of ways that we work. I recently had a client come to me who said that they are no longer working with their previous developer because that developer only takes retainer maintenance contracts and out does not do any new work and I think they had to have like 10 hours a week minimum or something like that. They pay for that and you can imagine how much that would cost. So it just wasn't cost effective for them to work with them anymore, but yeah, I have negotiable hours. You know, some clients just do a few hours a month and some use more or whatever. So you might be able to find, you know, different plans like that. **\[25:14\]** **Sean:** Yeah. I would say that if the your web developer offers you something, but it's not exactly what you want, whether it's too much or not enough, ask, I am always willing to negotiate like, if you want more of my time, great, we'll book more of my time with you. Because for me, I like knowing I have regular work and income, but maybe somebody else just prefers one and done stuff. You don't know. I think it just asks, that's the important thing. **\[25:44\]** **Mike:** Amanda, I know you have a lot of clients, if my understanding anyway, is that you have a lot of clients that come back to you for other work and stuff like that. Do you have any that are on any kind of a regular plan, a maintenance plan that pay you regularly every month and get a certain amount of your time? **\[26:00\]** **Amanda:** Not a lot I have one client who pays like a monthly retainer and so if they if they need me for that many hours then Great and if not then you know they get the high priority and if not I just sort of Kind of pocket the money But then also kind of like I'm a little more lenient the next month if they go over an hour or two whatever **\[26:23\]** **Mike:** So that kind of works out. I think it's common to have a clause that's like if you don't use the hours You can't roll them over or whatever that kind of thing I often have that yeah **\[26:33\]** **Sean:** I have that as well and it's important otherwise you have somebody banking hours for a year-and-a-half No, I'm not gonna do that obviously, but you owe me a redesign It's mostly about ensuring that you're available for them Yeah, and you could always if it ends up that they're not using the retainer for several months in a row Maybe they re re Negotiate it with you and lower the price in hours. So I'm **\[26:59\]** **Mike:** Amanda, do you, with that hours, those hours that they get from you, do you just make it available for any work that they want you to do, or is it specifically for software updates or something like that? Any work. **\[27:10\]** **Amanda:** Yeah. Any work that they want me to do? **\[27:12\]** **Mike:** That's usually how I do mine too. Me, too. Yeah. I've got some clients who, you know, it's like you said, Sean, you know, here's a new article though. I know word document. Just, can you put it on the site? And, you know, sometimes they could do it themselves, but they've got other things to do. We've got other jobs, so they send it to me and it's fine, so I don't mind doing that kind of stuff. **\[27:33\]** **Sean:** I'll do it. It's not my favorite kind of work, but I'm happy to do it. So what are some other advantages to having a maintenance contract that the contract D has? **\[27:46\]** **Mike:** That the person, yeah, the developer in other words, basically, no, not the developer. **\[27:52\]** **Sean:** The person who owns the site. **\[27:53\]** **Mike:** Contractor. Would it be? **\[27:55\]** **Sean:** No. Well, maybe I'm confusing my terms, but the person that We have a contract with our client. What would the advantage be for them of hiring us on a maintenance or a retainer? What would they get out of that? **\[28:08\]** **Amanda:** Well, I would think the one big thing is that, especially if we built the site for them, we know how to update it. We know how to maintain it. We've already got, like, I would hope, a fairly successful working relationship. There's like a trust that goes both ways. I think it's like a win for everybody. **\[28:26\]** **Sean:** definitely. So kind of familiarity with the site making it easier and faster to do updates than pulling in a random developer when you have a problem. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure I've **\[28:37\]** **Mike:** been in situations where I've been with the organization, like not with the organization, but I've had that relationship with them for so long that I end up being one of the senior, not senior, that's the wrong word. But like one of the, like you've got institutional memory That's longer than most people. Yes, that's what I'm trying to thank you. Yeah, like where I can actually say well I remember this conference that we're about to do or whatever for I remember when we did it last year And this is what we did then are we going to do and I'm able to you know introduce ideas like that because I have that ongoing Relationships so that that's definitely a benefit that that the website owners would have working with someone long term Absolutely. I think that's really important. Yeah another benefit of that by the way is to my point earlier about how it's more like a garden than you should maintain your site. If you have an ongoing relationship with a web developer, it is then easier for them to add new features regularly. Like if you get a developer to build you a site, then you say, okay, thanks, goodbye. I can update it myself. What if you do want to introduce a new feature that's not there? That's somewhat complex. And you don't have one of these kind of site builders or it's caused other problems or whatever else. If you're working with a web developer long-term, it's much easier to just say, look, I want to build in this feature. Can you tell me, can you do that? That kind of thing, and it'd be much, much more likely that'll happen. **\[30:05\]** **Sean:** How long is it gonna take? Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's in budget. Let's go ahead. Right, exactly. Okay, well, this is pretty good. **\[30:14\]** **Mike:** Have we covered everything? I feel like we've covered everything. **\[30:16\]** **Amanda:** I think we've covered everything, but just like I think a nice summary would be that If you're gonna do it yourself, or if you're gonna have somebody else do it for you, you should at least keep maintenance in your mind throughout the entire course of your project being developed. **\[30:31\]** **Mike:** Yes. And even after that, of course, don't let your website stagnate and just sit there. Absolutely. Keep it up to date. Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you very much for listening. Be sure to give us a positive review wherever you get podcasts. And check out the YouTube channel. Amanda, anything cool happening on the YouTube channel right now? **\[30:53\]** **Amanda:** Oh, we recently found our Spotify wrapped stats. And so we made a couple of smaller clips that just showed, hey, listeners, thanks. This is the countries that you were listening from. This is our most downloaded, our most streamed episode. And it was a nice little review of the last year just to see how much work we've put in and how much our listeners have enjoyed listening to us. **\[31:15\]** **Sean:** I really liked it, it was cool. **\[31:17\]** **Mike:** And you can go to, just go to YouTube search for website 101 podcast and we'll pop up there, right? **\[31:22\]** **Sean:** Or check the show notes, there'll be a link. Thanks for listening, everybody. Bye. **\[31:26\]** **Amanda:** Bye. Bye. Bye. The website 101 podcast is hosted by me, Amanda Loots. You can also find me online at AmandaLoots.com. **\[31:38\]** **Sean:** Recording from a secret there while plotting world domination, I'm Sean Smith, your co-host. **\[31:44\]** **Mike:** One of your hosts today was me, Mike Mella. find me online at be like water.ca or on socials at like mella. **\[31:57\]** **Amanda:** What's happening? I thought you were pointing at us. Sorry. **\[32:05\]** **Mike:** Microphone. That's all right. It's all good. All right. There's a note take for you. Yeah, Exactly. Hi. All good. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Sorry. We're talking about. We're talking about that we're doing the intro. So I'm gonna, but I'm about to say again, I probably did that, man. **\[32:25\]** **Amanda:** Not the intro. Yeah, you're not intro. My part's over with. You guys go now. Not you. I'll jump in. **\[32:32\]** **Mike:** I'll jump in. Here we go. Thank you. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). [![Listen on Google Play Music](/assets/images/google_podcasts_badge@2x.png)](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/itunes-badge.png)](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/spotify-logo.png)](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 06 - 1 [ Tools of the Trade](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-1/tools-of-the-trade/) - 2 [ Website Contract Advice From an Actual Lawyer](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-2/website-contract-advice-from-an-actual-lawyer/) - 3 [ Choosing a CMS](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-3/choosing-a-cms/) - 4 [ Tips for Website Maintenance](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-4/tips-for-website-maintenance/) - 5 [ Working with Conflicting Personalities](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-5/working-with-conflicting-personalities/) - 6 [ Building an Online Course with Jane Atkinson](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-6/building-an-online-course-with-jane-atkinson/) - 7 [ PodCamp Toronto 2023 Recap](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-7/podcamp-toronto-2023-recap/) - 8 [ The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly about RFPs](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-8/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-about-rfps/) - 9 [ Here's how to work from paradise](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-9/heres-how-to-work-from-paradise/) - 10 [ Rebroadcast: Pimp Your Typography](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-10/rebroadcast-pimp-your-typography/) - 11 [ Internet Privacy with Michael Geist](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-11/internet-privacy/) - 12 [ Lessons from a plugin developer with Ben Croker](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-12/lessons-from-a-plugin-developer-with-ben-croker/) - 13 [ Stand Out on Social Media with Jessica Perreault](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-13/social-media-with-jessica-perreault/) ### All Seasons - [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/) - [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/) - [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/) - [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/) - [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/) - [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/) - [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/) - [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/) - [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/) <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-END\]\]>