Who Controls Your Website?

This might sound like an odd question, but we’ve talked to numerous marketers at construction companies lately that do not have access to their website. I do not mean they want to host the actual website, they want to update it. In particular, they want to add new projects, edit team member bios, and other items. In today’s real-time information age, many marketers can not wait a week for an update to be made to their website – they need access now.

Every website in today’s world needs to be mobile friendly and have a way for the marketing team to update it. We build every website on a CMS (Content Management System) so our clients can update the text, add projects, and even add videos. They have full rein of the website’s content, but can’t touch the actual design (that’s to protect them from screwing something up, which they are usually grateful for). We train our clients how to update their website before their new website goes live. After that, they do not need us to make changes. We’re here if they need us for something big or if they’re too busy, but the intent is that they have control. We’ve seen when a marketer has control of his/her website, the website is updated more often, so it ranks higher in the search engines, and the company gets more work from their website.

We recently started working with a company to round out their marketing toolkit, but their website was already in motion with another firm before meeting us [I hate when that happens]. Our new client asked me to talk to him and he sounded knowledgable, but a few red flags were apparent to me. The biggest one, in regards to this topic, is that he did not build the website on a CMS. He added that if my team or the client had any changes, he’d make them free of charge. First off, that’s a bad business model when you do work for free (not sustainable). Before CMS websites, we did website updates and even charging for the updates, it was a poor business model because we couldn’t predict when clients would need changes so scheduling was always an issue. Since he is doing the updates for free, I doubt they will be timely. We’ve heard numerous horror stories of web companies taking weeks or months to make updates. (One even talked about putting up an event notification a year after the event.)

The point is that you need real-time control of your website in case of emergencies, exciting news, and just for efficiency sake. The time it takes you to write an email about any changes, you could make those changes yourself and check it off your to do list.