Buying and looking after a website

1. 1Choosing a website providerCheck a provider's own site and their clients' sites on your own mobile phone before you speak to them, then ask the six questions a salesperson cannot answer and an engineer can.4 minutes
2. 2Owning your own websiteA business owns its website only when it can name who holds the domain, the hosting, the code and the editor sign-in, and can move each without the supplier's goodwill, and most owners have never checked.5 minutes
3. 3Why a website that is launched and left decays, and what looking after it involvesThe old agency model is built to win and launch projects, not to keep them working, so most sites start failing in year two for want of anyone whose job it was to look, and looking after a site is a set of tasks on cadences set by published standards, priced for the work and not as a share of the build.5 minutes

More articles in this topic are being added, one a week.

• Fast, secure and safeWhat the three words mean, how to check each on your own site, and what goes wrong when one fails.4 articles
• WordPressWhy WordPress has become hard to keep safe, who should stay on it, and how to leave without losing a page.3 articles
• Search and AIWhat an AI reads when it reads your website, and what that means for the way a business is found.1 article
• How we thinkHow we approach a website: the order we fix things in, and why.1 article