Site maintenance for clients

Admin tool vs Monthly service charge?

[Ducati]

A friend has developed a user-friendly site admin tool for non-technical users to update a site and has given me permission to use it. As I'm just getting into freelance work, I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to offer the option to each client.

The options would be:

1) charge a one-time fee for the software
2) charge monthly service fee for unlimited BASIC changes
3) charge hourly fee regardless of site change

Any experiences with this? I realize that every client will be different and preferences will vary.

Has anyone had a bad experience with providing an admin tool?

Thanks for any advice.

[divaone]

its certainly a value-added service to offer. i've found clients tend to get excited about the possibility of 'controlling' their own site and end up wanting more things done = more work = more revenue. on the other hand, some tend to continue needing help regardless of how easy you make it for them. either way could work in your favor.

[balinor]

Hiya Ducati. I've done both, and honestly I get just as much return work either way, no matter how easy I make the administrative tool. Some people just plain don't understand computers, and you would be better off not even trying to let them do it themselves. Trying to teach a novice how to maintain a major web site is not usually a good idea :) On the other hand, if you get someone who knows the basics and can make the simple changes, they will still probably call you for the more complex tweaks. I've found that as I do routine maintenance, I can keep their site up to par as far as SEO and clean code as well, so that is a plus from their perspective. Hope this helps!

Regards,
Padraic

[webstudio]

Hi there,

Do not even think about offering your clients their own administrative interface of the site. i have many reasons for saying this in my experience but here are the main ones:

--You are loosing on a monthly revenue for maintenance
--You must support the software you sell them
--You may spend a lot of time building and developing the site, only to find that in 10 minutes they have made substantial damage to your pages (which means wasting your time, and potentially blaming you)
--Depending on what sort of service you provide, you want your internet portfolio to be as full of high quality sites that you have built and have control over, otherwise the credibility doesn't come to you, and in case of a bad development move on from your client you are made to look even worse.
--You are loosing a valuable skill, the ability to manage and control the lifecycle on your web system. do not forget that web sites are a different kind of information system. Do not get the end-user (or even client) to make adjustments to something that they 1) don't know anything about 2)provides buisiness value. If your clients want to take the onus of this themselves get them well educated and accustomed to your terms.

Hope this helps...

Andreas

[edited by: Travoli at 2:02 pm (utc) on Dec. 15, 2003]
[edit reason] no promotional signatures please [/edit]

[Ducati]

Thanks for the feedback.

The main reason I would like to offer this service is for clients to maintain/update text areas and editable regions. This would prevent them from compromising the site's look and feel but still enable them to make mundane changes like press releases and contact changes that would be a poor way for me to spend my time. Instead I could provide them with a value added service that my competitors may or may not offer. Sure I might be missing out on some potential revenue but in return for happy customers, it just might be worth it.

Thanks for all the input.

[beckie]

I agree with webstudio. 99.9% of my clients go with my monthly maintenance plan and most of them don't even have monthly updates. If they do have updates, it's just text which takes about 10 minutes to change out. It's a way for you to take off the burden of them having to learn HTML or deal with admin tools and focus on their own job.

I would offer them both plans and see what they go for. Just make sure you spell everything out for them and tell them if they know basic HTML, they should sign up for the admin tool. Maybe add a few links to HTML tutorials. Most clients would look at that as too much and will have you do it anyway. ;)

[divaone]

Ducati's main point, i believe is this:

<snip>I would like to offer this service is for clients to maintain/update text areas and editable regions. This would prevent them from compromising the site's look and feel but still enable them to make mundane changes like press releases and contact changes that would be a poor way for me to spend my time.</snip>

any child can edit text! any webmaster can create those editable regions as well. the question now is the last part - whether it will be worth the time for the webmaster him/herself to take on manual management of the site after completion.

imho, you will have to weigh the pros and cons:

pros
the customer will be thrilled at this option. the customer may give you more referrals, or at least speak highly of you for giving them this option. you can charge extra upfront for this option. the customer may have questions or issues in the future and again need your paid services.

cons
the 'friend' may come back later and decide you should pay for this custom programming (try snippetmaster php script). the customer may never need you again.

while i can see the points made by webstudio, when it comes to portfolios, there are numerous ways to create and maintain them. screenshots work well. you can also keep your own local copy of your completed work. remember, any time you give over a website, userid's and passwords, you give over control. anything can happen.

also, editing text is very different from editing coding. a professional webmaster doing site maintenance that only requires a few snips of text here and there is not gaining any valuable skills either.

edit: added a line!

[edited by: divaone at 2:31 pm (utc) on Dec. 17, 2003]

[divaone]

99.9% of my clients go with my monthly maintenance plan and most of them don't even have monthly updates. If they do have updates, it's just text which takes about 10 minutes to change out.

just another humble opinion, but if they are paying monthly for maintenance, should you not at least check their search engine placement? make monthly backups of the website? send them their visitor logs?

[beckie]

>>just another humble opinion, but if they are paying monthly for maintenance, should you not at least check their search engine placement? make monthly backups of the website? send them their visitor logs? <<

There are a lot of other things that I offer with different plans that they pay for. I never had a client balk at the price (which is very low compared to a lot of other companies) because they know it's worth it and they don't have time to update their website. There are a few who do know HTML and they make their own changes. When they sign up to my plan, they know exactly what they are getting (just text and image changes).

For the search engine placement... That's different than maintenance. I do offer marketing also.