Developer SOS - Have You Lost control of your own website?

Since its launch in September 2013 Inspire’s Developer SOS service has become very popular. But just who’s been using it? 

 

The majority of calls to our Developer SOS hotline (well, if we had one) have come from ordinary business owners (e.g. hairdressers, restaurants, dentists, etc) or charity trustees who decided that their websites just weren’t working for them anymore – sometimes literally, in that their site had fallen over and was essentially dead. More often than not, though, it was simply a case of site being 'out of kilter' with the latest web browsers or hard to use. That’s not surprising, when every month in ‘real’ time is more like a 'year for the web'. For whatever reason, these website owners couldn’t or didn’t want to go back to whoever designed their site in the first place, so they turned to us for help. We assessed what was wrong, took a backup of the site, did what needed to be done on the backup site so the site could function as the client wanted, handed it back over for review, and on sign off implemented the backup into live. This was exactly what we did for the European Aquaculture Society Student Group based in Belgium.

 

In a similar way we’ve found ourselves working on a lot of websites for charities, clubs, groups or associations who’ve found themselves up the IT creek without a paddle when their webmaster moved on. These types of website owners can’t afford to hire a specialist to update their site regularly, whether that means hiring someone to work in-house or on a contract basis for an hourly rate. They need to be able to do it themselves quickly and easily: I wrote about just one of these types of cases in an earlier blog (Park Practice Health). By upgrading the site and adding in the Inspire CMS (content-management system), we helped them to become independent once again.

 

Sometimes a charity webmaster or business owner just needs a helping hand. He or she might not have the skills or the time to take their website to the next level, or incorporate essential new features like social media or e-commerce. Maybe the site they had was perfect for when they were a start-up, but doesn’t suit them now they’ve grown or their business model has changed. They know how important having a website is for their business, and that having an antiquated site is doing them no favours at all. They’ve got no problem keeping the engines running, but they just can’t move forward. We’ve given them a jump start, and let them carry on down the road.

 

The final scenario that’s called for a bit of Developer SOS this year is one we’re keen to promote and see grow.  We’ve recently been assigned work from graphic designers, IT firms or other creatives who’ve needed to outsource their web development to a third party. Sometimes they didn’t have the technical skills their client wanted; sometimes they did, but just didn’t have the capacity at a busy time of year or when they were short of staff. In these sorts of cases we worked on a ‘white label’ basis ¬– taking instruction from our commissioning client and not the end user, delivering an outstanding product and riding off into the sunset.

 

If you think you might need a bit of Developer SOS, call Inspire today on 01738 700 006 or +441738 700006 from outside the UK!