What Website Reliability Means for Regional Planning Agencies
As a regional planning agency, one of the many critical roles that the website plays is its ability to provide the public and your partners with timely public notices and keep them informed of what is happening at the agency. When your website is unreliable, it can lead to broken or even missing pages, preventing access to meeting agendas, meeting minutes, and other documents in the public interest. At CH Web Agency, we understand your role and what website reliability means for regional planning agencies.
Perhaps your team needs a reliable way to provide updates on new transportation projects. Are you designated as an MPO and have federal partners who need reliable access to your Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) documents, TIP Amendments, and your current Regional Transportation Plan (RTP)?
The Role of Hosting Uptime and Monitoring
One critical part of website reliability for regional planning agencies is the hosting provider. If your agency is experiencing downtime across the website, impacting access to your public notices, meeting minutes, upcoming meetings and events, project plans, and community resources, take a closer look at your hosting provider.
What plan are you on? Do you have shared or dedicated hosting? Shared hosting means you are on a server with other websites. Dedicated hosting means your planning agency’s website is on its own server. Shared hosting can be highly advantageous, especially for keeping costs lower, as dedicated hosting setups can cost thousands of dollars per year. However, with big-name hosting providers, you can be on a server with hundreds of other websites and no guarantee that they have been recently updated.
At CH Web Agency, we approach hosting a little differently. If you’re having to think about hosting, it means something isn’t working. We make sure your hosting setup is designed for your site, which means that the website won’t experience hiccups as a result of inadequate resources or other websites on the same server causing performance drains. We also monitor websites 24/7 for downtime. Downtime is extraordinarily rare, and our website hosting service provider offers up to 99% uptime.
Why Dedicated Support Teams Matter
Regional planning agencies need a dedicated and competent website support team. With the wrong website partner, you can experience delays in fixes, broken pages, and limited access for critical federal and state partners. The right support team removes these types of headaches and makes managing a website easier for you, not harder. They keep the website secure, address issues quickly, and provide recommendations. They can help you post meetings and content, create landing pages, and help you build and measure access to public information and their translations. We believe that your website support team should feel like a natural extension of your agency’s team.
Our website design and development experts at CH Web Agency build and support websites for quasi-government organizations. Our team has worked with large agencies in North Carolina and across the U.S. Not only do we build and launch impactful websites, but we provide fast, professional, and cost-effective support long after launch. Our development process is designed to mitigate the chances of encountering performance issues like those discussed above. If you’re experiencing constant website bugs and an unresponsive web development team, contact one of our website experts today. We offer website audits and fixes for regional planning agencies with existing websites who may not be ready for a full rebuild just yet. Our team is just a chat, Zoom call, or in-person consultation away.
Planned Updates vs Emergency Fixes
Our experienced website design and development team understands the role that regional planning agencies play in the community and the expectations of their federal and state partners. We are dedicated to providing the same level of support and care in our updates as your team puts into planning for your community. This means we perform regular updates to your agency’s website to keep it secure, functional, and looking great. One of the reasons our team doesn’t encounter as many performance issues as our competitors is that we plan website updates.
Every month, we perform these routine updates to the website, including security patches. Each update is scheduled, and we conduct a series of compatibility checks to ensure that performance and layout remain unaffected. Emergency fixes are when an unexpected error appears on the website and needs to be resolved quickly. Emergency fixes are where the cause of the error may not be immediately apparent.
Because of our systematic approach to updates, emergency fixes are rare. Our team resolves most emergency fixes within a matter of minutes. For routine updates and questions, you can easily reach our website designers, and we are available after-hours and on weekends in case of emergencies. Regional planning agencies need a reliable website support team and often don’t have the resources to pay for a team of dedicated website staff to manage the website and protect it from security threats. Our agency can provide the responsiveness and level of support that comes with an in-house team at a significantly lower cost.
Trust and the Impact of Website Reliability on Regional Planning Agencies
Building trust with the public, the community around you, and your state and federal partners is critical to the success of your regional planning agency. Your partners expect that your website is always available. When you are being audited, you need the right website support team to keep your website secure and operational. A real-world example would be needing to post the meeting minutes for your last executive meeting. Your regular in-house website staff member is out, and you need to send it to your website support team to post it immediately. Our team is there, ready to get that document uploaded and available for partners within minutes. You can expect nothing less than exceptional support from our team.
You can trust that CH Web Agency will be there when you need us. For websites that we build and support, the types of errors we discussed in this article, while not impossible, are rare. We also provide support for websites that were built by different developers. In these cases, reliability depends on how the website was built; however, during our initial audit and takeover, we will make recommendations to enhance the long-term reliability of your website. Our goal is that worrying about website reliability is a thing of the past once you partner with our team.
