In 2013, I began a position as communications director for a statewide non-profit. My first and largest responsibility was to oversee the redesign of the organization’s website.

Yikes.

The existing site was so old, it was covered in virtual dust and cobwebs. Every time I logged in, a couple moths would fly out of my computer. The site was built on a version of Joomla — a popular web development platform — that hadn’t been updated in close to 10 years, a lifetime in terms of software.

The fancy new site, already under construction, was being built on a custom CMS (content management system) by a Memphis communications company. Much to my dismay, this new site would cost the organization nearly $50,000! My job was to oversee the completion of the site as well as the transition from old to new.

No pressure…

My previous website experience involved creating a couple simple sites in 1999, back when these things were built with stones and chisels and were powered by hamster-driven spinning wheels. Those sites had cost a grand total of around $800 and were a far cry from this multi-functional behemoth. I jumped in as best I could and rode the learning curve like a bucking bronco.

Half a year later, the new site was finished and installed. It was shiny, clean, and smelled like a new Chevrolet. It looked great, operated quickly, and was an immediate success. Our donors began calling the CEO and heaping praise upon the organization.

I strutted around the office like a prize rooster.

But after about six months, something happened. Things began to break. Parts of the site loaded either very slowly or not at all. Other staff members began grumbling, and pretty soon, I was avoiding people.

What was going on?

I called the Memphis company to complain and was told that we needed to participate in their maintenance program, which was expensive as heck. I felt as though we’d been duped into purchasing an incredibly expensive website that could only be maintained by the company that built it. I was frustrated and embarrassed, even though I’d come into the project after the fact. After only a year, we scrapped the entire site and started over within a much less expensive WordPress environment. That took another six months.

Sounds like fun, eh? I’m pretty sure I had a full head of hair when the project began.

Fast forward to the present. I now own a company that builds and maintains WordPress sites, and ironically, I find myself on the other side of the fence — in the role of the provider rather than the user, although I run four websites of my own. Throughout the past seven years of learning many difficult lessons, I’ve come to these three conclusions about any commercial website:

1. It will break, and
2. You’ll probably need help fixing it; and
3. You’ll probably need help keeping it looking professional.

Why is this? Isn’t the dang thing supposed to work??

Well … yes and no. Let me explain.

1) It WILL break

Think of a new website exactly like a new car, a fancy one. When you drive it off the lot, it seems inconceivable that anything could ever go wrong with it, right? It’s perfect! The problem is, new cars have thousands of tiny moving parts that interact with each other. When one part fails, it often acts as a falling domino and causes other parts to also fail. Before long, this manifests into a vibration in the steering wheel or a weird ka-chink ka-chink noise in the engine. Let this go long enough and you find yourself sitting in your fancy car on the side of the interstate, waiting for a tow truck.

Websites are just the same. Let’s use the WordPress platform, the world’s most popular, as an example. If your WordPress website has e-commerce capabilities, contact forms, a user login, integrates social media feeds, or any other type of interactive functionality, it relies on “plugins.” These are the little pieces of code that make those things work. Each of these plugins are (usually) created by different individuals or companies that are often making changes to improve them. We know these improvements as “updates.” When the webmaster receives notification of the update and applies it, chances are fairly good that a neighboring plugin — one that works in concert with the newly updated plugin — will freak out and stop operating, and in an instant, your shiny new website is stuck on the side of the interstate, or in this case, the internet.

Because the Website Fates are particularly evil, this often happens at the most insidious times possible. (For me, it happened once on December 31, just after I sent out an email blast to 100,000 contacts asking for end-of-year donations. Absolute nightmare!) Now, your boss is furious and you feel like a total dope. Possibly, an unemployed dope.

So what’s the answer? We all have to have websites, right?

2) You’ll probably need help fixing it

Here’s the deal. When you purchase a new website — especially a complex one that includes an e-commerce function and multiple pages — be prepared to also purchase a maintenance program. It’s that simple. When you have a qualified, experienced person dedicated to installing updates, testing purchases, and anticipating problems, you can head most of those issues off at the pass, exactly like you would when you have that new car serviced on a regular schedule.

But here’s a little secret: If you go with a platform like WordPress, you will have many, many companies or developers to choose from to handle your maintenance, as opposed to my situation at the non-profit with the $50K site. Since it was a custom CMS, only that company could do the maintenance, so they essentially had a monopoly and could charge whatever they wanted. WordPress, on the other hand, is an “open source” platform. This means that anybody can contribute to it and, if qualified, work on it, which tends to keep website companies that build WordPress sites “honest” with their maintenance plan pricing.

3) You’ll probably need help keeping it looking good

Communications companies like mine have a peculiar problem — it’s difficult to present prospective clients with examples of our past work. This isn’t because they don’t exist; it’s because we’re often too embarrassed to show anyone.

Why? Well, think about it.

When we deliver a new website, it’s a close to perfect as possible. The colors all match. The photos are all crisp and clear. The grammar and punctuation of the copy is correct. All the various boxes and elements are carefully aligned and all work together. If you’ll allow another analogy, this is akin to that amazing model home you walked through when choosing the floorplan for your dream house.

But unless you hire a professional to decorate it, your dream house will never look as good as the model home. It’s just true, and it is with websites, too.

In most cases, the client takes over the website after we finish it, which means they will, at some point, begin changing and updating the content, which is like you decorating your dream house with whatever furniture and decor that came out of your old house.

Many — actually, most — companies with websites don’t consider this. Unless they are large enough to hire an experienced webmaster to handle this work, it almost always falls to:

• An administrative assistant who usually handles payroll and accounts payable and plays the church organ on Sundays;
• A college temp who spends most of his or her time staring at TikTok;
• The manager’s pimply teenaged kid who needs the money for a new video game;
• That guy in the warehouse who “has an iMac and knows Photoshop,” or;
• The marketing person who is also busy designing the showroom, handling ad sales, making promotional videos, and a hundred other things.

You see where this is heading. Within a few weeks, that beautiful website becomes a jumbled collection of incorrectly sized, bit-mappy photos, clashing colors, misspelled words, and all other kinds of unprofessional madness.

So much for the model home.

This isn’t because those people didn’t work hard at it or have the very best intentions. It’s simply because they weren’t trained to design websites. You wouldn’t hire a yoga teacher to clean your teeth or handle your plumbing, would you? Of course not. Then, why assign an unqualified person to handle your website?

Designing and maintaining websites requires a certain skill set, just like anything else. So if you want your website to look great, work like it’s supposed to, and project a professional image of your company to the outside world, you must take it seriously. Here’s what I recommend:

1. If you’re starting from scratch, work with a web developer you trust and get along with to build your site.
2. Budget for a monthly maintenance program up front. Expect to pay $200-$300 per month. (In most cases, the developer is the best person for the job.)
3. Before promoting a new product or anything that involves using the e-commerce part of your site, test it. Then, test it again. Then, test it AGAIN! (Remember, e-commerce functionality requires not only your site to work properly, but also relies on your connection to whatever payment processing company you’re using.)
4. Develop a plan for who will handle your content updates after you receive your site, and make sure that they have the skill and time to handle it. If nobody on staff is qualified and you can’t afford a new employee, use an outside contractor, freelancer, or the original developer. (This will probably be a LOT cheaper than hiring someone full time.)
5. Above all, don’t try to beat the system. Like most of us, you are far too busy with your normal responsibilities to add handling a professional website. This will never end well, and I speak from experience, unfortunately.

In these days of COVID, we are increasingly living in a virtual world. Every day, more and more people choose to purchase things over the internet rather than going into a physical store. Every moment that ticks by sees another young person who was born during the internet boom — and never knew life before it — becoming an adult and begin making purchasing decisions. An online presence can no longer be viewed as an afterthought to your business, or simply a helpful tool for your customers. It is quickly becoming the most critical and indispensable tool of all.

Time to take it seriously; you can no longer afford not to.