There’s a saying about website maintenance that 90 per cent of the people who run their own websites should not.
You can’t take that personally.
But the best thing you can do about it isn’t trying to train yourself or to stretch yourself into that elite and nerdy crowd of people with the penchant for website management. Life is too short and you’re too busy. And your online presence is too important to be the subject of an experiment or a long, slow learning curve.
You want to avoid surprises and have your website achieve the statuesque transparency of the internet era — no one ever thinks about your website, or puzzles about it. It’s always just there. I get that.
I have been doing website maintenance and/or running servers of one sort or another since we connected to the internet via 1200 BAUD modems. And while a lot has changed over the years, it’s still pretty much a bunch of text files stored on computer somewhere and flung out across the internet to people who are looking for them.
I have the patience, the curiosity and the fervent, almost religious compulsion to eliminate error and warning messages this sort of work requires. I will apply your security patches and upgrades. I will make sure your backups work. I will weed the garden of your server: yank out the old stalks and trap the slugs.
And my nerdiness about markup, code and conf files extends to punctuation, grammar and caps. So if you need me to write, edit and post your content for you too, I can do that.
My background in journalism and communications also allows me to talk to you in a human language — two in fact. But if you need to converse with the developers in PHP or LAMP stack speak I can be your interpreter.
If being your own, your organization’s or your business’s web person is not what you signed up for, or is more than you bargained for, get in touch.