How to Make the Most of Your Website Maintenance Firm

 

TimeRunning your business is no small task. You know this, I’m not telling you anything new. Whether you’ve been open for ten years, ten months, or even ten days, you have felt the stress that comes with having the weight of doing business on your shoulders. Accounting, marketing, business development, more marketing, pricing against your competition, research – all of this adds up and that’s before you’ve even gotten to the reason you’re in business to begin with: providing a product or service to your customers.

And then there’s your website. Everyone keeps telling you that you have to have one. And they’re right, although their advice is a little dated. See, “everyone has to have a website” is good advice for a few years ago. It didn’t even matter if you threw together a site (however awful looking it may have been) on some free service that everyone knew was free. So long as you had a website that you could send people to, you had fulfilled your obligation and legitimized yourself as a real business. “Of course I’m in business – I have a website and everything!”

The problem is that, like everything else, time has changed what the web means to business. Gone are the days of just needing a website. Today’s customers, no matter what business you’re in, demand more.

You have to have a web presence.

Some of it is the evolution of the web in general. Some of it is because today’s internet is less about pushing information out and more about engaging and pulling people in. It’s about being found in the ocean of other sites out there through good search engine optimization. It’s about a customer adding you to their social streams and looking at your posts the same way they’d look at a friend’s vacation photos.

Some of you are reading this and thinking to yourself that it has gotten very, very complicated out there and you’re absolutely correct. Thankfully, we’re here to help. We are here to ensure that your presence on the web is just as polished as the image that you present to your customers in person and we do that in a number of ways.

 

We Manage Your Website Content

Whether it’s just making a quick change to an existing page or adding multiple new pages to your site and linking everything together, we can take your content and present it in a way that is clean and professional.

 

We Manage Your Website’s Design

The overall aesthetics and design of your site, as well as the use of images and video, can mean the difference between a customer buying from you or buying from one of the other websites they have open in their browser window. We can work with you to design a brand new site for your business or update your existing site to give it a fresh new look. We use modern design practices and clean code that makes the most of what the latest browsers can do. And, your site will be a unique creation – not some cookie-cutter design that we’ve used on a hundred sites before it.

 

We Manage Your Social Streams

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn – social media might as well be a job in and of itself. But make no mistake; it is one of the most powerful marketing tools you have at your disposal (next to your company website). When a customer or potential customer chooses to follow your posts they have opted-in to receiving your marketing message. They have said to you “I am so interested in your company that I am volunteering to have your marketing information mixed into the same stream of information as updates on my sister’s new baby.” We’ll help you capitalize on that.

 

We Get Your Business Found on Search Engines

No one can promise to put you on the first page of Google today. Search engines have become far too smart and they know when they’re being gamed and manipulated. That’s not to say, however, that whether you’re marketing on a global scale or just trying to be seen in your neighborhood or city, that there aren’t things that can be done to help push your site above those of your competitors. We do this through tried and true “white hat” search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that legitimize your business to sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, with none of the games that might lead to penalties that get you tossed to the bottom of the results heap.

 

How Do I Make the Most of Having Mackmedia as my Website Maintenance Firm?

It’s easy. We’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that your interactions with us are as seamless as possible because our business is designed to function as an extension of your business.

Here’s how to make the absolute most of it:

 

Direct and Open Communication

This part is most important. In order for us to present you to the web the way you want to be seen, we have to know what you think. We are here to serve you and your business so if there’s something on your mind – a design change you’re thinking about, a new strategy you want to try, a page you want to add, something you don’t like about the contact forms you’re getting – let us know. Ask yourself if it’s something you’d walk down the hall and talk to the “web person” about. If it is, shoot us a message.

 

Feed Us

Tech people love food and you’re welcome to send cookies, but that’s not what I mean here. A big part of search engine optimization is keeping your site updated with new content. Don’t just sign off on the final design of your site and think that you’re finished. Instead, think about ways that you can keep a fresh supply of high-quality content flowing to it that will keep visitors (and search engines) coming back for more. A blog like this one is a great place to start; we’ll show you how. At the same time, keep us up to date on any new products you’re launching, services you’re offering, price changes, sales, or special deals you want to offer. We’ll make sure that your site reflects an up-to-the-second view of what your business can provide to your customers.

 

Remember that You Pay Us Monthly

By using a subscription model, we’ve effectively done away with the dread of estimating each month’s invoice. Our all-inclusive plans start at $24 per month and you can do as much during that month as your service plan allows. There will never be a billing surprise and if you want to do something that is outside of the scope of your current subscription, we’ll work with you to set up a plan that covers it. Line-item invoices, and the fear of the billing that goes along with them, are a thing of the past with us.

 

Every one of our plans also includes access to our fully managed hosting solution. Not only do we manage all aspects of your web presence and maintain your website but you will never have to worry about how to keep your site online and ready for business. Our data centers are located in state of the art facilities built to keep servers running and sites online no matter the circumstances.

We are a simple, predictable, and easy to manage monthly expense; website presence, website management, website updates, and website hosting all rolled into one.

So there you have it. We think we’ve created something pretty special and we’re sure that once you’ve seen the difference that a website maintenance and management firm can make, you’ll think it’s pretty special, too.