Website Development or Maintenance costs more?

David_Roberts

Junior Member
I am a little confused, is the cost of website development is more than the cost of website maintenance? It's tough guessing a price of website maintenance by the hourly plans offered by few sites.

Do we need so much of maintenance after the website is done? I am planning to have an ecommerce site to sell goodies online.
 
Hi David,

If you're getting an e-commerce website built it really should have a content management system to allow you as the client/company behind the products to update, add, edit products and content on the site, I would steer clear of using a web development company that will only complete the work on the basis that all content will be updated by them for a recurring fee, unless you've already stated that you wouldn't have the time to manage/update the site in question?

Hope that helps,
Greg
 
Hello David,
unless your starting budget is very low, any ecommerce solution should come with an admin interface so you can update your online store, with product/service data, images, pricing etc, when ever you like and as often as you like.

There are typically two exceptions to this is,

ONE. if your starting budget is so low, an automated solution above wouldn't be cost effective for the development agency to install for you.

TWO. the solution is on a hosted service, where your pricing plan again is limiting you to what you can realistically do. ala https://www.shopify.com/services/signup

It really is budget dependent.
 
Thanks Guys, My ecomm site is in the design stage now. After my site is done and made live I will need to do content and image changes. This would be a regular but repetitive work which wont be too tough. So for such type of job the design company is charging a bit too much I feel. Even if I choose their hourly maintenance plan I might end up paying more, how will I judge the time taken by the company to complete the job is an actual valid time. I might get duped by the hourly plan.

So trying to find out a less complicated and affordable way for my site's future maintenance. Any recommendations?
 
Hi David,
As with anything, you really should get several quotes from different agencies, to get an understanding of rate and monies. From there is down to trust.
 
Hi David,

I'm assuming it will have some form of content management system then, as you mentioned you will need to do the content and image changes, in which case, could you not outsource the updates to someone else? ie. an employee, a colleague, a friend, a family member? If it's an easy-to-use/simple CMS then it should be possible to train someone else to carry out the updates at a lower fee?

Whilst the tasks may not be that demanding, the agency will be charging their standard hourly rate I imagine, as it's still taking someone the time to update, so you'll probably find your paying a more skilled/experienced person to carry out the updates. In the past I've even seen some people marketing themselves as being able to update websites using existing CMS, etc, so that could be another option to explore.

As Geoff mentioned, always worth getting a few quotes :)
Greg
 
Can anyone suggest few reliable website maintenance services. Which are tried and tested so that it will be become easier for me to choose?
 
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