Managing a website is all about managing change. Would you open a retail store and never move things or change signs? Probably not. Similarly, neglecting your website for months or years might work for you at the beginning, but as you, your competition, and your customers change the site will become outdated and ineffective. Creating a website is a strategic business investment. But, part of that strategy has to be maintaining and updating the website.

A website is a pyramid of strategic decisions - some made by you and some made for you. A website is a series of static or dynamic 'pages'. Dynamic pages require some form of content management system (CMS) involved. Your website pages are 'served' to the visitor by a web server. And, the web server is software running on an operating system in a data center. So you want to manage your own website? Which part - data center, web server, content management system, or content?

Have you ever had to switch between two cars and had to reacquaint yourself with different controls? Have you ever had to reprogram your TV remote after two years? Pretty hard even if you did it last month. This is the pitfall of managing your own website. If you don't interact with it regularly you may forget how. You spend time re-learning or you recreate something already done. Even with good instructions (that you actually watch or read) you may be spending more your expensive time re-educating yourself. Depending on how you value your time this may be a significant expense.

I'm happy to support you and train you to managing your website content. But, despite best intentions to be involved in updating content from the start, most people quickly realize that updating a website is much more cost-effectively done by me (your webmaster) because I deal with this stuff every day.

And then there are updates. All that stuff supporting your website eventually (some frequently) needs to be updated / upgraded / migrated with bug fixes, security updates, and new features. This level of updating is something I do not you. Neither of us can afford the liability of errors, mistakes, or omissions. Leaving a server or CMS without updates or security patches is a potent disaster waiting to happen. So I'll manage the server and CMS software updates - always.

If you really want to maintain your own website content I'll work with you to teach you the right way. Just be prepared that it is never as simple as opening an editor and typing away.

Oh! Did you forget something? What about your domain? Did you renew that? If I'm managing your domain it will always be automatically renewed. If you manage your domain, that's totally up to you. Just be aware that a lost domain is frequently just that - lost.