MAINTENANCE
Existing Web Sites
If you already have a web site, we can maintain or enhance it for you. Provided you can give us access, we can manage your web site on your current hosting service. However, there may be significant benefits to transferring both your site and its associated domain names to a Shore Fx hosting and domain name management plan. A site transfer to Shore Fx can be completely transparent to you and your customers. In many cases, transferring your site to Shore Fx enterprise grade servers can open up many more options for you to leverage on your web site. We include a complimentary site review as part of our initial consultation and offer suggestions with cost/benefit analysis for you to consider.
Detailed Site Review
It's not unusual for a client to be aware of issues on their web site, but not know exactly what is needed to solve them. We offer a complimentary high level review as part of our initial consultation. We can also perform a much more detailed review (cost quoted in advance) of your site. A detailed review includes a more extensive analysis of every page on your site, your domain and email account configuration specifically covering areas such:
- Page specific SEO recommendations
- Link checking (to and from each page)
- Optimizations to improve page load time
- Security analysis
- Site analytics data if available
We can fine tune our analysis based on the issues you may have experienced and the specific features on your current web site. The results are clearly documented for you to review. Recommended solutions are prioritized so you can easily decide which items should be addressed first. During a detailed site review we develop a thorough understanding of what your site is and how it works. Subsequent maintenance quotes are typically lower, recognizing that we have a lower learning curve to implement changes on your web site.
Content Management
If you have a static web site and are finding you need to update pages regularly a content management system (CMS) may be the perfect solution. We offer full and hybrid CMS migration paths. A hybrid CMS solution allows parts of your web site to remain static, while select pages or features (for example an image gallery) are enabled with Shore Fx CMS allowing you to update those elements whenever you wish from any web accessible computer. We also have experience creating custom content management applications when you have requirements that don't fit well with the industry standard CMS systems we typically use.
Cost
We will carefully review each maintenance request and provide a firm quote in advance for your approval. Our quotes include the time required to complete a task and the hourly rate that applies to your request. You will know in advance the maximum price for your maintenance request. If it takes longer than expected you pay no more than our quote. If we complete the task quicker than expected, we bill for the actual duration. We bill with a 30 minute minimum and in 10 minute increments thereafter.
If your web site needs significant enhancements or regular maintenance we will work with you to understand the details. If necessary we will prototype an enhancement or perform a trial run of a regular maintenance task to help us both better understand what is involved and how best to price the task. We are flexible and can tune a quote to a specific customer's needs.
In some cases significant maintenance projects should be compared to the time and cost of creating a new web site. If we feel this might be the case for your project, we will help you make this tradeoff by providing multiple proposals to compare time and cost.