Web design, CMS and development, since 2014VR Games
A development studio once took orders at this address, and the page that stood here was a price list: tiers for a single-page site, a business site, a corporate site and a shop, each with a delivery time and a form. Price lists age badly. What does not age is the part they never explain — what maintenance is, and why it is a separate order from building the site in the first place.
Development ends with a launch: the pages exist, the content is loaded, the forms send mail. Maintenance begins the next morning, and it exists because nothing under the site stands still. The CMS releases a security version. A plugin author stops updating and the next core release breaks the gallery. The hosting provider moves to a newer PHP branch. A certificate expires. None of that is a fault in the original build, and none of it is covered by the phrase turnkey product.
The honest scopes are boring and specific. Core, theme and plugin or extension updates, applied in a staging copy first when the site earns money. Backups with a restore actually tested, because an untested backup is a hope, not a copy. Monitoring, so that an outage is noticed by a machine rather than by a customer. Security patching and a plan for the day a patch is late. A small allowance of content edits, spelled out in hours rather than adjectives. Compatibility checks after browser and PHP releases. Anything larger — a new section, a redesign, a payment provider — is development again, and pretending otherwise is how a retainer quietly turns into an argument.
Two shapes dominate. A fixed monthly fee buys a defined list and a response time, and suits a site whose shape is settled. A pool of hours suits a site that keeps changing, as long as both sides agree what a spent hour looks like in a report. The number that matters more than the fee is the response window, and the window only means something if it names working hours and a channel. A promise to fix things quickly, with nothing behind it, costs nothing to make.
Who holds the domain registration, the hosting account and the administrator login — you, or the studio? Where do backups live, and can you download one yourself? Which plugin or extension licences are paid, by whom, and what happens to the feature when a licence lapses? Is there written documentation of the stack, or does the knowledge live in one person's head? And the question that decides how expensive the others become: what happens if the studio closes or you leave? A maintenance arrangement you cannot exit is not a service, it is a dependency.
This magazine writes about content management systems, plugins and web design; it does not take orders, quote projects or collect contact details. The forms and tiers that stood here belonged to the studio that used this address years ago, and they are gone rather than preserved, because a form that goes nowhere is worse than no form at all. What is kept is the part a reader still needs: the vocabulary to read someone else's offer and see what it does not say.