Maintain your own website? Keeping your website up to date is something most businesses farm out to contractors. Smaller businesses operating on a shoestring budget—especially when just starting out—may have opted to handle this on their own.
This makes sense for some people. For example, I’ve been building and maintaining my own websites for around 20 years now. I used to pound out HTML code by hand until WordPress and Joomla took over. Anything in plain HTML these days looks obsolete. Before that, I operated a dial-up bulletin board, and I wrote all the DOS batch files for those. So I’m one of those guys who can handle the job of maintaining my own sites.
That said, there are a lot of people who are terrified of that back end. While I find the WordPress to be pretty straight-forward, other people wouldn’t know where to start. And granted, maintaining your own site requires the chutzpah to be willing to screw things up.
A lot of companies hire somebody to do their web work, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re happy with the return on investment and the contractor is giving you the quality site you deserve, then keep ’em.
Another factor to consider is the dollar cost of time. If I spend three hours working on the website, that’s three hours I’m not working on client jobs. It can actually be the cheaper option to farm out the work.
On the other hand, I actually enjoy getting into my sites and making changes myself. That activity feeds the analytical half of my mind, the side that would get bored if I spent all my time writing. I also have a good understanding of how my site works and what sorts of things can go wrong.
Even if you hire somebody to manage the website, it’s still a good idea to know your way around the back end in case the contractor is unavailable. It also allows you to make changes to the text or post to the blog without having to go through somebody else. That makes updates faster.
It really comes down to a combination of personal preference and the dollar cost of your time when trying to decide whether you should maintain your own website.