After launch

Website care plans

Owning your website and looking after your website are two different jobs. You will own it either way. This page is about who does the second one.

Talk to me about it See the plans

Why this exists

Sites don't fail on launch day.

They fail eight months later.

The trading hours changed and nobody updated them. A form stopped sending and nobody noticed for six weeks. A certificate expired and now the browser warns people off. Nothing dramatic happened. It just quietly stopped being true.

The failure is invisible from the inside.

You are not visiting your own website. The person who is, is a stranger deciding whether to call you, and they will not email to tell you the phone number is wrong. They will just go somewhere else.

Someone has to do it.

That is the whole argument. Not fear, not “30,000 sites are hacked every day”. Just the plain fact that a website is a thing that needs looking after, the same as a vehicle or a set of books, and most business owners would rather it was not them.

The plans

Two ways to go.

Hosting, $30/month

Your site stays live, fast and secure
SSL certificate kept current
Security updates
Daily backups
Uptime monitored around the clock
Nothing for you to remember
Extra work at $130/hour

Looked after, $60/month

Most clients

Everything in Hosting, plus:

30 minutes of changes a month, no questions asked
A simple editor built for your site, so the things you actually want to change do not need me at all
A plain English email each month telling you the site is fine
First in the queue when something is urgent
Extra work at $110/hour

No lock-in. 30 days notice, any time.

What makes this different

You get an editor built for your site,not a dashboard to learn.

Most websites hand you a general-purpose admin panel with four hundred settings, of which you need six. So you never log in, and every small change becomes an email to somebody.

I build you a simple editor that does the things your business actually changes. Trading hours. Prices. A staff photo. This week's specials. Four buttons, not four hundred, and it is built around your business rather than around a piece of software.

The easy things stop needing me. The rest I handle. And you still own all of it, so if you ever want the keys to the whole thing, you get them.

A cafeUpdate today's specials and the opening hours
A tradeAdd a job to the gallery, change the service area
A clubPost an event, update the committee list

“I already paid for the website. Why is there a monthly fee?”

Because the build and the upkeep are different things. You paid a builder to build the house. The monthly fee is the difference between a house that is looked after and one that is not. Nobody notices the difference in month one. Everybody notices it in year two.

The other option

You can also just run it yourself.

That is a genuine option and it costs nothing. Everything gets handed across with written documentation for how it all fits together. No exit fee, no hard feelings, and I will help with the move.

Questions

Care plan questions.

No. Every site I build is handed over in your name and it will run perfectly well without me. A plan exists because most owners would rather the hosting, the certificates, the backups and the small edits were somebody else's job. If that is not you, take the keys and go.

You give me 30 days notice and I hand over the domain, the source code, the database, the hosting account, the analytics and every login, with written documentation for how it fits together. There is no exit fee and I will help with the move rather than making it awkward. Your website is yours. I just look after it.

No. Month to month, 30 days notice, cancel whenever. I would rather earn the next month than trap you in it. If you cancel, hosting and support stop, and everything else is still yours.

Text edits, swapping a photo, updating prices or trading hours, adding a staff member, publishing a post, fixing a link, adjusting a form field. Anything that works within the site as it is built. A new page or a new feature is a build job, so it gets quoted separately at a fixed price.

I tell you before I do the work, not after. Small overruns I usually absorb without mentioning them. Anything meaningful is billed at $110 an hour on the Looked After plan, and you approve the number first. There is never a surprise invoice.

Yes. It starts with a paid review, because taking on somebody else's build sight unseen is how you inherit a problem. I spend an hour going through the hosting, the code, the plugins and what you actually control, then tell you what it would cost to look after and whether it is worth keeping. I quote the review before I start it, and the fee comes off your first month if you go ahead.

Uptime monitoring pings the site around the clock and alerts me, usually before you have noticed. Most outages are a hosting-side issue and get resolved in minutes. If something worse has happened, there is a daily backup to restore from, and Looked After clients go to the front of the queue.

A care plan keeps the technical side healthy: speed, mobile, uptime and the search foundations that were set at build. It does not include an ongoing campaign chasing competitive terms, which is quoted separately. The longer answer on SEO.

Any time, in either direction, and it takes effect the next billing month. Plenty of clients start on Hosting, find themselves emailing me small edits, and move up. A few go the other way once their site settles down and stops changing.

New pages, redesigns, new features, ad campaigns and content writing beyond small edits. None of that is upkeep, so none of it is buried in a monthly fee. It all gets quoted separately as a fixed price before any work starts.

Looking for a new site instead? See how a build works.

Get started

Not sure which one you need?

Tell me about your site and I will tell you straight. If you are better off running it yourself I will say so.

Prefer email? Reach Matthew at matt@doleritedigital.com.au

Website care plans

Sites don't fail on launch day.

Two ways to go.

You get an editor built for your site,not a dashboard to learn.

You can also just run it yourself.

Care plan questions.

Do I have to be on a plan?

What if I want to leave?

Am I locked in?

What counts as a change?

What happens if I go over the 30 minutes?

Do you look after sites you did not build?

What if the site goes down?

Do you do SEO as part of this?

Can I change plans later?

What is not included?

Not sure which one you need?