A common issue for website owners that need future maintenance on their sites is that they are unable to contact the person who originally designed or developed their website.
This is often due to the number of freelancers working in the extremely competitive web industry. Often freelancers will find it tough getting work for themselves and so decide to go and work for a more established agency. Similarly established agencies are quick to buy up the businesses of local talent and at the same time reduce the number of competitors they have.
Never fear. All is not lost. If you’ve had enough of ringing a mobile number that never gets answered and sending emails that never get a response, read on for some options that are available to you.
If it’s a Small Job, Find Another Freelancer
If you only have a small number of website edits that need doing, your best option may be to find another freelance website developer / designer to take care of those changes for you. Using websites like People Per Hour will put you in touch with hundreds of freelancers who will bid to do your work.
Always give an accurate description of what work needs to be done. Post your website URL so that the freelancers can take a look at what they need to do.
Finding Another Website Agency
The thought of finding another freelancer who you may never meet to do your website work may not appeal to you. Also if there’s more than just a few website changes you need to do you will want to find a web business that you can build a working relationship with.
In pretty much any town across the UK you will be able to find a small number of website agencies that offer services such as design, development and SEO. Arrange sit down meetings with a selection of these agencies and see who you feel most comfortable with – get them to quote for any work with a written proposal. The quality of the proposal documents you receive will tell you a lot about the quality of the website work you are likely to receive.
Time for a Change
Not being able to contact your website developer may be a blessing in disguise. It gives you the opportunity to review your website and decide if it meets your current needs and current website standards – like responsive design for example.
At the time you had your website built, mobile devices might not have been an important consideration for website browsing. Now, of course they are a the most common devices used to browse the web. To make sure that websites work well on all devices a new standard in website design has emerged – responsive websites.
Liam at Identify Web Design told us “if you’re building a website from scratch, a responsive design is an absolute must. It means your site will be accessible to all users, regardless of the device they are using and it helps future-proof your website”.
You may find any new agencies that you approach will prefer to offer a completely new website build rather than maintaining or editing your existing site. There are many ways to code a website and each developer will have their own preferred methods. As such developers will usually really dislike working on a site that someone else has built. Perhaps the deciding factor in this will be cost and often you’ll find the cost for a new build stacks up well against the cost of having work done on your existing site.
And Finally…
A big issue with not being able to contact your website developer may be that you don’t have access to your website, your hosting account and your domain name. If you don’t know which company registered your domain name you can find out by visiting who.is . Searching your domain name here will tell you who hosts the website attached to a domain name, the company the domain name was registered with and much more. Call the support number for you hosting / domain registrar for details of how to get access to your accounts.