Why we DON’T do ad hoc website amendments

One of the most common questions we get asked is…

“Can we pay you to make amendments to our website?”

In most cases, the answer is, no.

Unless we’ve built the website, we DON’T take on clients to make ongoing changes or odd jobs.

Please note, this post DOESN’T apply to you if we’ve built your website and we will certainly help you with ongoing changes if you need them.

Honestly, we hate turning customers away. We always feel terrible about it.

Up until recently, we’ve tried to help as many customers as we can, but we’ve now made the decision to focus entirely on building websites from start to finish.

In this post, I wanted to explain why we made this decision.

1. Every website is built differently

No two websites are built the same, even if they’re both built using WordPress they can be created using entirely different methods and frameworks. This makes it very time consuming for us to get to know your website and make quick changes.

You might want to pay an hourly fee for the work to be done, but it could take a few hours just to get to know your website before we even think about tweaking things.

Not to mention that most WordPress websites use child themes and 3rd party plugins that can change as time goes on. If these aren’t kept up to date, it can have severe consequences on your website. This could cause even more headaches and slow the process down even further.

When we build websites from start to finish, we use the same method every time. We use a framework and tools that we trust, and we wouldn’t use anything else. We know what to expect and can make changes easily.

Chances are, your site is not built this way, which is why we can’t begin to know how much time it might take, and how much we might charge.

2. We want to focus on what we do best

We specialise in full website redesigns, and we love every minute of it. The process we use to create websites has proven to work over and over again.

However, this process takes up all of our time, and we can’t stop doing this to make website amendments.

All of our time is spent either:

• Speaking to existing and potential clients
• Planning out projects and schedules
• Sketching grid layouts to come up with page designs
• Designing websites with tools like Photoshop or Illustrator
• Coding websites to make it look like the designs
• Migrating existing content onto the new site
• Moving physical products onto the new website
• Transferring over your SEO settings

As you can see, there’s a lot of work to do, and we want to make sure we don’t let our process suffer.

We love to take a website that may not be performing well and redesign it piece by piece to bring it back to life. We need to focus 100% on this for us to be effective.

3. There are only two of us

Let’s be honest, there are only two of us and how me and Lyndsay spend our time is very important. Building websites takes on average 2–3 months and every website is unique and comes with a different set of challenges. We have to plan our projects months in advance to make sure we build high performing websites and keep to deadlines.

If we were to take on small, random jobs for additional clients, it just couldn’t work. Our schedule would be put on hold, and our web design projects would be delayed. Even if we plan it in months ahead, we would still have to rearrange other projects around yours.

This simply isn’t feasible and we would never want our core services (e.g. full website design.) to be affected.

4. We might not agree with your suggested amendments

This is a tough one. We try to be as helpful as we can and we always share our knowledge and experience with our clients when they ask.

Occasionally, we’ll get asked to make website amendments that we DON’T think are a good idea. Certain changes may impact your website in a negative way, and user experience or SEO may suffer.

Other companies may say “no problem, whatever you want” and then make the changes.

We can’t do this, we’d rather explain why it’s a bad idea and then come up with other suggestions that might work better. We would hate for you to hire us to make changes and then leave with a worse-off website.

Unfortunately, this takes more time for me to explain and then implement the changes we agree. All the while, we’re not working on our main projects.

We still offer advice, of course. If you need some direction on what to change on your website, then check out our website critique page. We’ll review your website and tell you how to improve it.

Summary

Ultimately, it comes down to time. If we had more time in the day, we’d happily help everyone.

At this point, we want to focus 100% on creating epic websites from start to finish. We love getting fantastic results for our clients, and if this means we lose a bit of extra money here and there, that’s ok.

Building stronger relationships with fewer clients is our goal with Jammy Digital and we’d love to work with you in the future.

Over to you

Hopefully, now you’ll understand why we don’t take on more clients for ad hoc amendments. If you do need some help and advice, why not join our Facebook group… Website Tips for non techies. We’re a lovely bunch and we’ll help where can.