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Monday, May 30, 2011

Looking to Save Money on Your Web site Maintenance? Read This!

By Aaron S. Robertson

If you consistently find yourself paying fees to your Web designer to publish regular updates on your Web site, we may have a solution for you that will accomplish two things:

1) ultimately eliminate these fees for you
2) give you the tools and resources you need to make these updates yourself without having to wait for your Web designer to get around to them, and in a way that doesn't require you to understand code and all the other nitty-gritty technical details that us Web development firms understand.

Consider the following case study:

Not too long ago, we redesigned Legacy Salon and Day Spa's Web site. For a period of many months after Legacy's site was completed, we were still actively in the picture because they needed to make an update to it every month to announce the special of the month.

One day, I got to thinking. I thought, they had a blog that was going unused. It was pretty much just sitting out there in cyberspace, with no one actively updating it. There were only a couple of posts on it, published some months prior. What if we offered the appropriate staff members a quick tutorial on how to use it, and let that serve as the means to announce their monthly specials?

So I called my contact over at Legacy, and I told him what I was thinking. He thought it was a great idea.

Here's what we ended up doing, in a nutshell: We deleted the page that we were using to announce the special of the month. Then, we simply renamed the button on the site's menu bar that linked to the blog from "blog" to "daily specials" (they wanted to start listing steeply discounted daily opportunities based on unfilled appointment slots).

Presto.

I offered the staff members that would be in charge of maintaining the blog a little tutorial on how to operate it, and now they're good to go. Legacy is not only saving the monthly fee we were charging to handle the listing of their specials, but they can also ensure that the changes are getting done exactly when they want them done.

Legacy's blog is built on the Blogger platform, which is the platform that this blog is built on. We highly recommend Blogger. It's so easy to operate, and there are a lot of cool things you can do with it. No need to understand complicated code.

In closing, this may be the perfect solution for you if the only thing you need updated regularly are the specials you're running. As long as the rest of your site can remain largely static (meaning none of your other pages have to be updated on a regular basis), this may be a great idea for you to consider.

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