Website Management: DIY Is For Home Projects, Not Your Business

If you only spend time looking at websites, but you’ve never built and been involved website management, you might not be aware of all of the time and expertise that is required to do it effectively. Websites are ever-evolving, and they need to fit and change with the needs of the business. Sometimes, business owners think that they can manage it themselves, or that they can give the task to one of their employees as a side project. It might be possible, depending on the expertise that you happen to have on staff already, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s a simple and quick task. Here are a few of the largest difficulties of managing a website yourself.

Strategy of Website Development

To have a successful website, the planning and execution have to start from the beginning. Without a strategy in place, you can have a user-unfriendly website that just becomes more tangled the longer that is up without any kind of plan in place. You can also waste a lot of time if you don’t identify a few key aspects of your website, including: goals, audience, and brand image.

Websites Are Ever-Evolving

One of the biggest pills that business owners need to swallow is that they can’t just put a website up and expect it to be effective for the next couple of years. Websites need to grow and change with the company.

Websites Have Technical Issues That Need To Be Addressed With Expertise

Issues as simple as broken links need to be fixed on a regular basis so that a website runs at optimal performance. Websites also need a strategy to deal with user traffic and the volume of input data. Websites that don’t have this strategy in place have technical and security issues that are difficult to solve.

Websites Must Balance Business Objectives With Performance Optimization

Your website must be designed to fit the needs and goals of your business, but it must also be designed so that it is optimized to work quickly and efficiently. Websites must work for different types of devices, and they need to be maintained with website management services so that they have quick loading times. Your website can be designed to meet your business goals and be aesthetically appealing, but if a user has to wait too long for it to load, can’t read it on their mobile phone, or they don’t trust the security of the site, they might never see it or buy your product online.

Businesses Need Social Media

Social media is becoming ever-more integral to developing an online business strategy. Many businesses need websites that are designed and managed with social media in mind.

Websites Must Be Scalable

Websites not only need to grow with the company, but they also need to grow with the needs of the website. When websites aren’t scalable, they have performance issues later on. Website management services can help make a website that is scalable.

Website Content Must Evolve With the Needs of the Business

Content must be optimized for search engines, and it must also fit the needs of the business and the message that it needs to send. Creating content is more time-consuming and difficult than it might seem. Even outsourcing takes some time. When you manage your own website, you are 100% responsible for deciding how you will spend your resources, and you don’t have any guidance on what will make the biggest impact on your business.

It’s easy to look at a website that is running smoothly and assume that it is just as easy to create that. Websites are intentionally designed to look effortless and flawless, but there are many moving parts that are hidden below the surface. When everything is working seamlessly, you miss all of the work that goes into creating and managing a beautiful website. It’s when a website is not properly created and managed that you begin to see some of the work that is involved. Website management is much more time-consuming than what many people might realize, and a business owner needs to ask herself if her time is best spent gaining experience as a website manager and developer, or if the time is better spent actually running her business.