Maintenance & Backups – What WebDev Projects Really Look Like, Part 12

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Tie up loose ends by ensuring that your good work will be properly maintained by the client (or your firm, or a contracted IT vendor, as the case may be).

Maintenance & Optimization 

• If the client discovers that part of the site isn’t working, you need to fix it as quickly as possible. Original planning and budgeting needs to provide for this possibility, as well as for some amount of ongoing feature tweaks. 
• One important (yet often overlooked) developer duty is to provide the functionality for a continual feedback loop with your client’s internal back-end users. Be prepared to answer questions such as, “I want to post a video, how do we do that?”
• Consult Website Pulse's best practices to establish your own.

Back-End Management 

• Another critical functionality is allowing new site owners to see all their content and make any necessary changes. 
• This should be planned for when choosing the site CMS, according to the particular needs of the client, and the idiosyncrasies of its staff.
• Try to anticipate these needs when creating training documentation, but don’t view questions outside of that coverage as annoyances. View them as learning situations for creation of the next site documentation, and as opportunities to provide a higher level of billable service.