Welcome to Tim Dunham

Tim’s role is to update and manage existing websites, catering for clients that need changes made be they a telephone number or entire new sections added to their website.

Clients needs vary – but in an environment where the mighty Google needs constant attention and feeding of news and fresh content, it’s been increasingly hard to keep up with the various websites we manage.

NComp@ss is different to ‘most’ other web design companies, far to frequently a designer will develop a clients website, make it look nice, pay some lip service to SEO and perhaps recommend a trick or two.  But essentially when the job is done that’s it.  They get paid.  Perhaps the client will revisit the website after a year or so and make a few changes, but the web designer will have lost interest.

Here we believe passionately that you need to keep up dating the website frequently with all your news. Your website needs to grow with your business, adapt, change and improve over time.  So we make a big thing of being there to support a clients needs.

And that’s where Tim comes in, his role is primarily to fulfil the needs of clients on a day to day bases.

This also gives Tim the unusual ‘status’ of being the only NComp@ssian to work from the main office, all other SEO, Adwords, Social Media, Developers and Designers employed by us work from their own locations, homes, small offices etc.  It makes us nice and flexible, but for Tim’s role we thought differently – a degree of common sense and discussion is often required to decide on the best way to adapt a website and for that we choose an in-house role.

As this is really an ‘Advice’ column as opposed to a ‘Our News’ column, we thought we’d end on a little maths – taking purely arbitrary figures for the costs of managing and maintaining a website, here are a few examples:

Example 1:
Assuming a website costs £1500 to build, includes a small content management system so the client can update rudimentary parts of the website.  Assuming the website lasts 4 years and assuming the clients requires occasional updates from us, you might average £200 per year.

Net cost after 4 years would be £2300 for a ‘up to date’ website.

Example 2 The alternative:

Assuming a website costs £1500 to build and no updates were made… after two years it would be hopelessly out of date, after four years? a further injection of £500 might be needed, but after fours years you would need a new website.

Net costs after 4 years would be £2000 and a new website needed for another £1500, £3500 or an increase in costs of 65%.

Example 3 – eCommerce:

Assuming an eCommerce website costs £6000 to build, includes a content management system, but most updates where handled by us for a monthly rate of £185 per month.  Assuming the website lasts 4 years.

Net costs after 4 years would be £14880 for a fully ‘up to date’ website

Example 4 – The Alternative:

Assuming an eCommerce websites costs £6000 to build and almost no updates done above the essential product management, i.e. no changes to the structure of the website or static pages.  Costs keep as low as possible and perhaps allowing for £1000 of emergency attention over 4 years.  Finally for eCommerce you would need to factor in lost sales due to poor management of the website, these could range for anything from 20% to 60% of revenue generated.

Net costs after 4 years would be £7000 and a new website would be needed for another £6000 plus the lost sales, assuming a small website with ‘profits’ of £20,000 per year, this additional cost could range from £4000 to £12000.  The net costs would then be between £17000 – £23000.

===============

In almost every case example one can consider where a business is reasonable profitable it would be far better value to keep a website up to date and reasonably managed for the right price.

One final take home would be to suggest that a well maintained and updated website might even last 5 or 6 years delaying the need to invest and build a replacement website – whereas a poorly maintained website may well need a proper revamp after less than 3 years further reducing the cost effectiveness of it.

So we welcome Tim and the service he brings, ultimately this means NComp@ss can better support clients in a cost effective and professional manner.