Websites as Long-Term Infrastructure
If your university program or lab needs a website, your team is likely looking for long-term stability, brand consistency, and a well-organized infrastructure. It’s important that the website is designed to scale with your team’s needs. Careful planning is essential to designing a website that can support university programs and labs for several years without needing a major overhaul.
Universities have complex website structures. This means that the permalink structure has both breadth and depth. It also may mean that there are a large number of taxonomy terms supporting the university’s content. As the website grows, new pages and posts are added. With new pages and posts come requests for additional features and functionality. This may have even been what led you to start thinking about website support for universities.
With the right website support team, the website remains fast, efficient, and healthy long after launch. New requests are folded into the structure of the website, and content grows at scale. However, if you don’t have a professional website support team, those editing the website may unsustainably make changes that lead to the website structure breaking down, pages being difficult to organize and find, and ending up not meeting the needs of students, faculty, and staff.
It’s important for university teams to think of their website’s full lifecycle and how the website is a long-term infrastructure project. This means not just planning to add a single landing page for the upcoming seminar, but how to sustainably add new features to better support all future events so that it’s not just a one-off. This prevents multiple solutions being created for a single problem.
Planning for the Full Website Lifecycle
University teams need a website team that understands the university system, accessibility compliance, and how to maintain websites so they sustainably grow each year. University budgets for website support and maintenance can often be limited, so it’s essential that rebuilds are not necessary every couple of years. A professional web agency that supports universities knows how to work within these constraints and the system to deliver exceptional customer service and professional website support.
If your team works within a university system and needs professional website design and development support, reach out to our experts at our web agency. At CH Web Agency, our team of website designers and developers plan for the full website lifecycle. We offer competitive packages for website support and maintenance as well as any website changes that might be needed. Our unlimited website edits packages are tailored to your team’s needs, making it easy for you to budget for the year and have all of your annual website needs taken care of. CH Web Agency provides transparent and predictable pricing to support university programs and labs. We can help you connect faculty profiles, build the alumni network, support student metrics, and connect labs with international partners through custom landing pages for forums and conferences.
We plan for the full website lifecycle. Immediately after launch, we’re there to support training of staff that will be posting content on the website. With our support packages, we make sure that the website remains secure and that updates are made on schedule. Our 24/7 website monitoring immediately notifies our team of any issues. While downtime is extraordinarily rare, our staff are standing by to resolve any problems. If your team signs up for the unlimited website updates package, they can send any website changes to our staff over our dedicated communication channels. Tasks are completed quickly with many routine requests completed the same day and most larger requests within a week.
When major updates, special functionality, or new features are requested, we offer the right solutions to make sure that your website is updated with the same care as it was originally built. The same expert website team that built the website will provide all updates.
What Proactive Website Support Includes for Universities
Long-term university website support can take on a few different forms. Universities that provide hosting for all lab and program websites will have strict security rules for hosting and website builds. Our website team understands how to work within these constraints. We build and support university websites that are compliant long after launch. If your university allows hosting outside of the university’s own servers, we offer competitive hosting packages. While this is rare, in our experience, it may be allowed for some labs and affiliated organizations such as foundations.
In this case, we handle all of the website security and hosting services. This means making sure the WordPress website remains secure. This might include WordPress, theme, and plugin updates. Our professional hosting services include regular checks and scheduled updates to the server environment. This could include updating OS versions and software packages, such as the latest version of PHP. CH Web Agency is a professional website design agency in North Carolina. Our team makes website updates as part of a routine schedule. We also push critical updates outside of the regular schedule to keep websites as secure as possible. We plan all updates and mitigate downtime and unexpected issues by building maintenance into our website support packages.
Managing Website Support Without Disruption
Our team understands the university schedule and will provide exceptional website support during your team’s most critical moments. This includes supporting application deadlines, matriculation, updates to program metrics, and helping your team with any featured events throughout the year. We are dedicated to providing the same level of support and care in our updates as your university dedicates to students, faculty, staff, and research. This means performing regular updates and checks on your university 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 all 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. For routine updates and questions, our team is easy to reach, with after-hours support available for emergencies. Universities need a reliable website support team and often don’t have the resources to pay for a dedicated staff member to manage the website. Our web agency can provide the responsiveness and level of support that comes with an in-house team at a significantly lower cost.
Risks of Deferred Website Support
If your university website is hosted within the university system, security updates and firewalls may be handled by the university. The big risks of not having a dedicated website support team is that the website infrastructure, design, usability, and accessibility will start to break down over time. Websites rarely are static, and that means that content and pages are constantly being modified. With a professional university website support team, the website will be maintained so that the website looks better than the day it launched. CH Web Agency strives to improve websites with every update. That means refining the design, improving layouts, and updating user flows to better serve our university partners.
CH Web Agency is a professional web design agency offering WordPress and website services in North Carolina. We support websites for universities here in the state of North Carolina and nationwide. If your team is in need of secure, reliable university website support services, reach out to our website experts. We offer website support for university teams with existing WordPress websites and as part of all new website builds.
