Ongoing Care
A website is not finished when it launches. This is the part most inexpensive sites leave out, and the part that decides whether yours is still working in three years.
What happens without it
Certificates expire and the browser shows a warning instead of your site. A patch is not applied and a known fault stays open. A form breaks when a mailbox changes and nobody notices until a customer mentions it, weeks later. None of this is dramatic; it is the ordinary decay of a thing nobody is looking after. Ongoing care is somebody looking after it.
Changes to the site
When your hours change, a service is added or a photograph needs replacing, you send the change and it is made, checked on a phone and a desktop, and published, with the previous version kept so anything can be put back. Each change is recorded with what was changed and why, so the site's history is readable later by anyone, including a designer who is not us.
Larger changes, a new page or a new section, are quoted as small pieces of work rather than folded into a retainer you cannot see the inside of.
Things that happen without you asking
- Certificates renew on a timer, and the timer is checked, so the renewal happens weeks before expiry rather than being discovered after it. The authority that issues them is shortening certificate lifetimes over the next two years; the renewal path was built for that
- Patches are applied every day, and the server restarts on a schedule when a patch needs it, at an hour when nobody is reading
- Monitoring is the server reporting to us: a daily integrity report, and an alert the moment a service fails, delivered through the business mailbox rather than a third-party dashboard. A problem is noticed by us before it is reported by a customer
- Backups are taken daily and weekly, and the restore is rehearsed on a schedule, so the backup is known to work before it is needed
- Measurement repeats: the server is re-scanned against the government checklist it was built to, on a schedule and whenever the checklist changes, and the result is kept beside the previous one so a regression is visible
- Credentials are reviewed once a year and rotated on a fixed interval, with the old one withdrawn only after the new one has been proven to work
A named person
You have one contact, who built the site, knows it, and answers. There is no ticket queue, no tier one, and no offshore chat. If something is wrong at nine in the evening you will hear back from the person who can fix it, and when it is fixed you will hear what happened in plain words.
Everything written down
Every procedure that touches your site exists as a written runbook with a script that implements it, and every incident and every known fault is recorded with its cause and its correction. That is not paperwork for its own sake. It is what lets the same work be done the same way next year, by us or by whoever you choose after us, and it is what an auditor or an insurer asks for when they ask how the site is looked after.
Already have a site?
Ongoing care can be taken on for a site somebody else built, after a look at how it was made. Ask, and you will get an honest opinion of what it needs.