Affordable website maintenance and support for small businesses
Your website is important to you and to your target audience. Keeping it functioning and up-to-date can be a time-consuming and sometimes complicated chore. Finding someone to help who has the right skill set, is conscientious and affordable isn’t easy either. Until now!
At Website Rescue, we specialise in those small tasks and we have the skill set, based on 30 years professional internet experience. As the online landscape evolves, it’s crucial to stay ahead. With our web support services, we’ll help you navigate the challenges that arise. We have a portfolio of thousands of completed projects ranging from minor text and image updates to entire 100 page web sites for well-known international clients. We now prefer to work on smaller projects and tasks but we can still create a new high quality web site if that’s what you need.
In particular I’m concerned at the number of pub websites in need of some attention (as a frequent customer!). I have the expertise and I want to help. Since 2000 we’ve lost a quarter of our pubs. Covid, the Ukraine situation and the cost of living have added to the problems of those that remain. Pubs are a vital part of the life-blood of our communities, we must help them thrive in these challenging times.
We offer affordable web site support to any business, club, charity, organisation or individual. Examples of past work available on request.
Problems?
There’s no charge for asking if we can help. Whatever your problem, our 3 decades of working on all aspects of the internet put us in a strong position to solve problems others can’t.
Explain what’s causing you concern and we’ll give a yes or no answer as to whether we think we can help. There are occasions when we can’t help, in that case we’ll suggest what else you might try if we can, that too is at no charge.
We usually can help and if you then ask us to address your need and we’ll quote a price.
It may be as simple as explaining a bit of the technology you need clarifying or giving an impartial opinion if you think someone is “pulling the wool over your eyes” to get you to spend unnecessarily.
Security alert
Are your website visitors seeing scary security notifications? Even if you have a SSL security certificate it may not be properly configured or there can be other causes which are harder to spot. It’s OK, we’ve seen those problems before and fixed them.
Old news and events
If you have a news or events page you need to keep adding updates. The picture shows a site that had been updated a couple of times when it was quite new, the neglected for several years. Many web sites I’ve seen just have a single news item “Welcome to our new website” years after the site was launched. If you have a news page either keep it up to date and deliver news your visitors will value or delete the page. I very nearly attended an event “advertised” on a website as being “next Thursday at 7:00 pm” but no date was shown. I checked, the event was 2 years ago!
I understand the problem, you find the technical aspects of the update a bit tricky. We can do those tasks for you. What we can’t do is to create the content, only you know when your next quiz night will be.
Domain names
We can advise on choice of name then purchase and configure it to direct traffic to your web site and to route emails as appropriate. We can take over management of an existing name and provide no-hassle expert ongoing support and maintenance.
Website hosting
Choosing a web hosting service is a minefield. With little IT knowledge you need to make an important technical decision about which service to use. Prices range from free to £thousands a year. There are reasons for that. Free or cheap services come with strings and/or limited capabilities. I’d not expect a small business like a pub to be paying as much as £200 a year or as little as £50 a year. And then there are the add-ons: You need an SSL security certificate, that’s an extra £50p.a. (ours are free).
With our hosting the price you pay includes everything you need, any future increases are no greater than inflation or because you have requested some changes.
If you are paying too much or service levels are poor, we can probably offer a better deal. Don’t worry about moving the site, we can usually do that too.
Integrity
When we quote a timescale and price we stick to both. If you change your mind about the requirements then we may need to revisit the costs – yes you can request that extra feature but it will cost a bit more.
Who do you trust to have login credentials to work on your web site? Do you want to run the risk of using someone with sloppy security? The risk of inadvertently transferring a virus from their PC to your website? Or leaking your password so the website gets defaced? Our MD spent decades working for a global Banking corporation on their IT systems and websites, security was the utmost priority. That matters.
DIY website?
Built your own website and hit a problem? Don’t worry, we can probably sort it out and it won’t “break the bank”. No harm in asking…
Broken web site?
Broken web site? It’s not uncommon to come across websites that display error messages and warnings or simply fail to function properly. Many of these issues can be easily resolved, but it takes expertise to do so. Even if you possess the necessary skills, time might be a constraint. Website Rescue specialise in resolving problems that have stumped others, often in a matter of minutes.
Regular maintenance
Routine updates cost less! Suppose you like to replace your menu every month for example, when we’ve done it once, doing the same again is easier so we charge a bit less! The more use you make of our service the less we charge for each instance. Just drop us an email with the changes you need and it will be done, often same day and maybe even outside normal office hours.
Top listing on Google...
We can’t deliver that, nobody can. That doesn’t stop people emailing you with exactly that proposal. They will offer to fix problems you didn’t know your website had. That’s because they’re wrong but they hope you don’t know that. It’s spam, delete it. Our free advice for improving your visibility on Google is to follow Google’s advice to webmasters. Getting everything right is near impossible and even for a small web site it can take days of technical effort, you can’t afford the time and you can’t afford the fees a competent expert will quote. There are simple things most businesses can do to improve, not necessarily their Google ranking, but something more important – their profits. Website improvements are one of the ways to achieve that.
All your eggs in one basket?
“One-stop-shop” web services like Wix or SquareSpace sound attractive, they take all the decisions for you and deliver their standard service. In theory you can make your own updates and everything is supposed to be simple. If you don’t like their services, moving elsewhere is intentionally difficult. They are keen to sell various “optional extras”. Disregard promotional offers, their high renewal prices more than pay for any initial discount.
Already got one of those web sites but struggling to make changes? We can probably help.
Illiterate Web Designer?
We can all make mistakes with spelling and grammar. We can forgive the occasional typo, but a website filled with glaring errors reflects poorly on the business.
Perhaps some of the faults lie with the web designer, but the owner ultimately takes responsibility.
Whether we like it or not, people are judging us based on the content of our website.
Many web design companies outsource portions, if not all, of their work to countries with significantly lower pay rates, often resulting in poor English language skills. These same individuals are the ones we typically interact with when we contact a help desk.
So the question arises, can you identify and correct these mistakes?
Maybe you weren’t an exceptional English student, or perhaps you struggle with the update mechanisms.
We can’t claim to be entirely free of typos, but we make a genuine effort, as updates are our specialty.
We’re not perfect, and you may find errors on this site, but whenever we notice something amiss, we promptly fix it.
Free advice!
Not sure if an email or phone call is a scam? As a strong believer in the benefits the internet can deliver, the fraudsters devaluing it with scams and spam make me angry.
The simplest guidance is that if you are suspicious you are right to be. 90% of scams are readily identifiable as such. The other 10% are scams too, just a bit less obvious! More
Any client of ours, past or present, is always welcome to ask our advice on web and internet topics, no charge.
Unresponsive web designer
When you want something done you want it done quickly, affordably and correctly. Many web designers are only interested in building new web sites, they don’t want the hassle of small tasks they can only charge a few pounds for. If you press them maybe they’ll accept the task but will they give it priority? and at what cost?
A driving instructor asked for our help. He’d been quoted £150 to replace the photo of his car when he bought a new vehicle. Even if it needed a few tweaks that’s just too much. We did it immediately and charged £20.
£20 just to upload a photo? There’s more to it than that. Making the photo “internet ready” (for faster loading), upload and insert into the web page was trivial (for us). Most of the cost comes from start-to finish time for the overall task. That includes the exchange of calls/emails with the client, obtaining log-in credentials, understanding how his web site works, finding our way round his web-hosting service (yes, they’re all different!), creating an FTP account to upload the file, recording the transaction in our accounts package.
Error pages
Well that one is at least a bit better than what the user sees if the web designer didn’t create a 404 error page, this is an example:
Better still is to make sure there are no errors. Second best is to show a list of pages the user might find useful, no need to scare them with big bold and unhelpful 404 ERROR!
Out of date content
That “easy to use” system to edit your website isn’t as easy as the salesperson told you. The result? Out of date opening times, wrong contact details, last year’s “upcoming events listing”, pictures of bar staff you parted company with. You need the help of a computer wizard – but isn’t that expensive? Not us: fast, affordable and effective updates are our speciality.
Image sourcing or manipulation
Digital photos are not well suited for the web without at least some basic tweaks. There is no point in having a photo 5000px wide when nobody has a screen wide enough to display it, nor need it be at the resolution needed for a printed glossy magazine. Even with fast broadband large images can be slow to load. Those with slow broadband will get impatient and find another website. Also Google penalise slow-loading websites in their search results.
We can also apply a wide range of technical tweaks to images, edit photos to remove (or add) elements or help source suitable stock images.
Anything you need, just ask, if we can help we will.
Key requirements for a pub web site
I’m hiker, that means I’m a pretty frequent visitor to pubs. There’s information I need when I’m planning a walk ending at a pub. I’m astonished at the number of times I have difficulty finding that information. These are the “headline” items:
- Location – at least a Google map with a marker pin in the right place.
- Opening hours – if you change opening times then update the website.
- Food service times or holiday closures, update!
- Upcoming events – Have a prominent headline on the home page, kept up to date, possibly linked to a “news blog”.
- Menus – ideally within a web page rather than downloadable PDFs (except as an optional extra way to view them).
- Contact details – sometimes I have to search to find the phone number and email address (as long as you check for incoming email frequently).
- Parking – Many “official” car parks in tourist areas are getting very expensive. Make your car-park into an additional source of income.
- There’s a lot more I could add: lets talk!
Jargon
The image above is known as a tag cloud or word cloud.
It sometimes seems that computer geeks professionals speak a different language. DNS records, Javascript, bandwidth, FTP, MySQL, SSL, Inodes, MFA and so many more… These are useful terms for internet professionals communicating among themselves but used when speaking to a non-technical user they are just gobbledygook. If we are ever guilty of that I apologise! Please ask for clarification.