We are lucky that our offices are not far from the beautiful Blenheim Palace in West Oxfordshire. With its manicured gardens and treasure trove of a house, it takes a large and dedicated team of people with a robust schedule to keep everything in good working order and looking its very best.
This led us on to think about who takes care of your business? More specifically, once your website is up and running - who ensures that it is kept up to date, in good working order and most importantly, secure?
This is a question we pose to the hundreds of different business owners we work with across the year. They come from organisations of all shapes, sizes and maturity and from a wealth of different industries. Some come to us with a plan of exactly what they want to achieve through their web presence and have a clear idea of the long term ‘health plan’ of their site. For others, this isn’t the case and we happily step in and guide them through the areas they need to consider pre and post the website build to ensure they get the site that they want and importantly, the site that they can manage for the future.
If you are thinking of getting a website built for your business, or looking at updating your current site, you need to consider the following:
Content. Sites with out of date information, or ones which do not reflect key messages are a poor reflection of the business. Imagine a shop still displaying Christmas items in its window – in June! You need to assign a content owner. At a basic level this person needs to keep track of what’s on the site, establish if it’s out of date, if it’s carrying the right messages for the business, plan in when content changes need to take place. Ensure phone numbers and contact details are correct, that there are no typos and that photos have the correct permissions for use on the site.
Tweaks and changes. Does your website provider give you the opportunity to make tweaks and updates to your site further down the line? This is an inevitable part of having a website and buying programming hours up front is a good way of ensuring that you have time ‘in the bag’ for the future.
A security process. Your website host should be running regular and timely updates for you. Without this, your data is vulnerable and you run the risk of being in breach of the new GDPR regulation.
A back up plan. You need a plan for when things go wrong. Just like you have a breakdown cover for your car, you need to know who to call if some functionality on your website goes down or if you are unlucky enough to be hacked.
An eye on the future. You need to ensure that your website is serving the needs of your business. If you are making changes to your organisation, it’s more than likely that your website will need to change too. Someone needs to own that strategic responsibility for keeping the physical and virtual on the same tracks.
Who are we?
We are Olamalu, web technology experts. We’ve been building sites, solving unique business problems and spreading our love for making business work better through technology for well over a decade.
We firmly believe that a website is a long term investment and are passionate about supporting our customers to ensure that they get the very best from it. We offer a basic ‘niggle’ level of customer support for every site that we build, along with regular security updates and fixes. We also offer more comprehensive customer service and security packages for those who need it.
If you are looking for a new website provider or technology partner, get in touch. We are a down to earth and friendly bunch and would love to hear from you info@olamalu.com