subject: To Be Successful, Your Site Needs More Than Online Marketing [print this page] The purpose behind having a website is to get people to see it. Without the traffic, having a site is pretty much pointless for a small business. You can have the greatest site in the world, but if no one is seeing it, than you might as well not have one at all. This is where online marketing comes into play, but it is not all that is required to have a successful website. Sure, it is important, as that is what spreads the word about your site, but there are also other very important aspects that you need to keep in mind if you want to see success online.
A website backup service acts as an insurance policy for your website should anything unexpected happen. Chances are your hosting provider has some kind of backup they perform, but the vast majority of hosting providers do not actually guarantee backups and require that all customers (that is you, if you were wondering) provide their own backups in the fine print of their terms and agreements. Don't believe me? See what your host has to say about website backups.
In the event that the server hosting your website goes down, or there is some sort of complication or incident that causes your site data to be lost, a small business could be devastated, especially if they rely on their website for new customers or ongoing operations such as selling merchandise online. Imagine the fallout if you realized that your site has been lost with no way to retrieve it. You would have to start from scratch, and since websites are typically costly investments, you could be looking at a proverbial world of hurt.
The third thing that is highly recommended for any small business is having some sort of website maintenance services available for updates and changes to the website. Now, it is entirely possible for most changes to be made in house, such as updating page content or adding links, but there are still several things that can be rather tricky to do in house, such as changes to the overall design, layout, or navigation of the site. Trying to make changes in these areas without knowing full well what you are doing can be extremely detrimental to the website. Making a mistake in the wrong place can break large chunks of coding and cause your site to look horrible, or even stop functioning altogether.
The best advice I can give for website maintenance is to have the people or company who built your site do all the maintenance for you. They are the ones who know it best, as they built it, and will be the ones who can make changes easily and quickly.
