If you have been looking for someone to build your business a website then it is likely that you’ve been looking at a number of web agency websites. You have likely encountered a lot of technical jargon accompanied by columns of technical specifications comparing the plans on offer.
To be honest, our website is no exception and you can go to our Managed WordPress page, but we know that for most businesses those specifications are meaningless and the time just isn’t available to learn what seems like a foreign language. So here in (mostly) simple terms is why you should choose Unbranded Space for your Website design and ongoing maintenance.
Service
Unbranded Space has clients with simple websites, with just a few pages, to others that have a page count that runs into the hundreds. However, it doesn’t matter where a clients website fits within that range, with our Managed WordPress Service everybody is equal. Broadly speaking we view ourselves as the “guardians” of the clients’ websites that we manage through our plans. We make ourselves as available as we can be to answer questions and provide the service that fits each client. Some want to learn how to do updates themselves where we are happy to provide training at an hourly rate, while others are happy to pay us to do the updates when required. Some clients require us to do content updates every month, while others may not require it at all, but in either case, we are always monitoring the site and performing those maintenance updates in the background.
We genuinely enjoy learning about different businesses and the interaction we have with our clients and are grateful for the business. Our business is scaled so that we are always on a first-name familiarity with all of our clients, even those from distant shores.
Knowledge
We focus on one thing and that is WordPress websites. Not just how to use WordPress to design great websites but also how to maintain them, making sure they are secure and up-to-date. If something does go wrong we know how to fix it. We also know how to market WordPress websites. We understand how Search Engines view WordPress sites, provide tools to help with SEO and we’ve learned how to “tweak” a WordPress site to improve organic search.
Our knowledge isn’t just technical. The Unbranded Space team are all highly skilled and experienced designers. We don’t just understand what looks good, but also how to design an experience for our clients’ customers while they are on their website. Through Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) we know how to get people to your site, but through User Experience Design we also know how to optimise the conversions you need for a successful website.
Value
We know that the service we provide represents great value for our clients. However, we do sometimes get asked why we charge the fees we charge for our Manage WordPress Plans. We don’t mind being asked this question because it helps us improve on how we explain it every-time we have to. We also get a bit of a buzz, because when we explain our fees to someone we get reminded of just how much value there really is within what we do. So here is a quick rundown of the core elements of our WordPress Plans
WordPress Updates
WordPress is what is known as a Content Management System(CMS) and it is a brilliant platform. It allows businesses to have websites that can be easily updated and provides a platform for almost limitless expansion.
Websites have evolved a lot over the years, where once upon a time it was possible to code a website directly with a language called HTML, it has now become prohibitively expensive to do this because of the level of sophistication with the technology that runs behind even the most basic of websites. CMSs such as WordPress have evolved to largely dominate the web world. WordPress is one of the biggest, powering a staggering number of websites throughout the world.
Using WordPress makes the job of building and updating websites much quicker than coding from the ground up. By reducing the time it takes to build websites it also makes available advanced features that used to be only available to website owners with budgets of tens of thousands.
There is a cost to having all of this advanced functionality. WordPress constantly requires updates and it is important for security reasons as well as maintaining future compatibility that the platform is kept up-to-date. Our Managed WordPress Service ensures that the WordPress CMS is kept up to date. We do this by monthly logging in and performing the updates to the WordPress platform as well as plugins (see the next heading for what plugins are). A small handful of plugins that we trust are set to update automatically but the majority we update manually. Then after performing the updates we manually audit the site to make sure the pages still appear and behave as they should.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress is the Core CMS, and then there are PLUGINS, and what they do is add functionality to WordPress. They can take the form of enhancing security, optimising speed, improving SEO, perform automated backups as well as extending the functionality of a site ie. adding a shopping cart system for example.
Unbranded Space use a suite of tried and true plugins that provide the core essential add-ons that we believe every website should have ie. security, backups, performance optimisation and SEO tools. We also add a page builder which makes updating a website even quicker. Its relative ease of use makes it possible for clients to update their own websites. All of these plugins require licenses to be paid for annually. The total value of plugins Unbranded Space provide to our clients equates to over $700 AUD every year. This alone equates to over 70% of the cost of what we charge for our Managed WordPress Service. Add in maintenance (updates), hosting and the other features included and the value is easy to see.
Website Hosting
Unbranded Space provides website hosting in partnership with an Australian wholesale company. Our experience with hosting goes back more than 20 years. We have dealt with hosting companies from the US and other countries. We have experienced cheap hosting companies with unbelievably poor customer service and substandard products, and we have learned. We have been with our current hosting partner Synergy Wholesale for over 5 years and they are by far the best we have worked with throughout all our years of experience.
Our hosting partner excels in all aspects ie. service quality and speed as well as product performance and flexibility. They aren’t the cheapest (why would you want cheap hosting for your business website ?) and we aren’t going to boast that they provide the fastest website hosting in the world. It may well be that they do, but we don’t really know or care. What we do know is it is the fastest we have used and when combined with all the other elements of service, our hosting partners earn our 5-star approval and give us the confidence we need to provide our services to our clients.
Domain Name
Domain Names are your websites unique identifier and Unbranded Space can include the cost of registration and ongoing renewals of your domain name. Some people prefer to keep their domain separate and we are fine with that. But we provide a free .com domain with Domain Privacy or a .com.au or many other domain alternatives. These can all be managed within our client dashboard by our clients but really with our Managed WordPress Service, you won’t need to manage a thing, we’ll do anything domain related for you.
SSL
(often referred to as a Digital Secure Certificate or SSL certificate)
SSL is essential for all websites. It’s pretty common for websites to have free SSL certificates, and we include one with all of our managed WordPress Service Plans. However, it is astounding how often we will encounter a website that does not have the SSL properly configured. One common occurrence we see is that the HTTPS version of a site is secured by SSL, but the HTTP version is still publicly viewable making the entire exercise of having an SSL certificate null and void.
Sorry! – We just threw some technical jargon at you there when we promised we would try not to. But it is important to know that just having an SSL on your website is not enough if it isn’t properly configured. Unbranded Space will make sure that your SSL is always valid and properly configured with a Managed WordPress Service Plan.
The X-Factor
As much as we can talk about the individual aspects of what we provide to our clients, what we feel ultimately gives our clients true value is the X-factor of our service. It is the extra value we can’t quantify, the thing that ties our service, knowledge and value together – it’s that we care. We care about the websites we manage because we know the stakes are high for both us and our clients. We know that a website can make or break a business and that it is the success of our clients’ websites that determines how successful we are.
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It is difficult to not get too technical in describing what we do because a lot of what we do is fundamentally technical by nature. We appreciate and feel the pain that most clients face when trying to understand the complexity of what comes with a modern website.
A WordPress Service Plan is founded on performance & security. It is complex in what it does in the background, but we keep it simple for our clients. Unbranded Space becomes an easy choice by providing a comprehensive trouble-free solution that can be relied upon.
