Sometimes contracting an outside agency isn’t just about the regular maintenance of a website, but also insurance when things go terribly wrong for an organization.
Sometimes, terribly wrong means that the person responsible for most or all of the requirements of a web site internally for an organization becomes unavailable.
At that point, the organization has a contact point for the web site in case of this emergency. It can prevent software, domain, hosting and other paid subscriptions from lapsing and causing the site to fail. It provides a reference as to why the site is structured the way it is, and how to best utilize it during the emergency.
Things happen, sometimes terrible things happen. Make sure all the keys to your organization’s website aren’t locked up with one person. And make sure you have access to somebody who can figure out what you need to do with those keys if something terrible happens to the current maintainer of the site.
Recently, the person responsible internally for our client’s website passed away rather suddenly from Covid. Unfortunately not much was documented internally as to the server lease and domain registrations, which had been handled by him. They were all coming up for renewal and the client wasn’t aware of what was involved, had not been getting the emails sent from the server company, and was at risk of having their site deactivated. We saw what was going on and coordinated the server and domain renewals so that there wasn’t an interruption or failure of service. We were the backup for a valuable person that could no longer help our client.
We don’t often think of ourselves as insurance for a client, but it became clear that we were that for their website in this case.