Last week I was having lunch with a friend who works for an IT company. Having a web developer on board, they were looking for ways to increase their revenues by fielding more web design and development projects. The catch, however, was that managing web design and development projects can be a whole different beast than managing IT work. The world of IT is driven by panic-induced short-lived tickets escalating upwards and downwards until they are resolved. Whereas building web sites can take weeks or months to complete with relatively minimal client interaction. IT requests can be extremely disruptive to the web developer trying to build out a large project, making them undesirable. Was there any other way to get web site design and development work as an IT company?

After finishing our burrito and quesadilla we were able to put our heads together and come up with something that would work — focus on maintaining existing web sites instead of building new ones. For those IT companies out there looking to bulk up their revenue stream without chasing new clients, here are some ideas on how to add web site maintenance to your list of services. The overhead is small and the diversification can help you through a skittish economy.

How to contract web site maintenance work

You already have a running client list, so start there. Find out which of your clients have a web site online. Familiarize yourself with the web site and decide if maintaining it would fall inside your staff’s realm of competencies. Call up each client, or take them out to lunch, and tell them you have a new service you would like to offer them, that you would like to maintain their web site as an additional service to the IT support you already provide them. If you are in need of a maintenance contract that clearly spells out hourly rates and response times, please download and use our free web site maintenance contract (PDF). Most small businesses out there have a difficult time finding someone to maintain their site once it’s been built, so they will likely be receptive to your offer. Once they’ve agreed, it’s just a matter of getting them signed up with the appropriate rates and handing them off to your project manager. From there, the project manager can handle obtaining the server credentials and other pertinent information required for accessing and maintaining a web site.

How to manage web site maintenance work

Chances are you already have a ticketing system in place for the IT side of your business. If not, you may want to check out our task management system, Intervals, for tracking requests and the time it takes to complete them. Web site maintenance requests are going to be very similar to IT requests. Usually, something has broken, is behaving incorrectly, or someone can’t login. And every so often a mail server may go down or a web server may stop responding to SSL requests, in which case your IT skills are perfectly suited to handle the issue. The incoming request is usually urgent and the time it takes to complete is usually not very long. Because web site requests are so similar, they can be tracked in the same manner as IT requests. A ticket is created and assigned, and the assignee completes the request and records her time so the client can be billed accurately. As the project manager, you can run a report for the client to show how much of their budget went to IT versus how much went to their web site. In the end, it’s really not different than IT work, except that the project manager must now handle a few additional work types and possibly one or two more support staff.

How to complete and deliver web site maintenance work

This is the easy part. As an IT business you should have no problem setting up a development server with the system requirements needed to mirror your clients web sites. Once you are ready to begin work, create a staged copy of the site on a development server using virtual hosts and use this server for client approvals before pushing the completed requests to the live web site. You can take it one step further by setting up versioning for each site you maintain and track the history of changes completed under contract in case the site needs to be rolled back to a previous version or you need to dig out a snippet of code deleted long ago. The staging server makes it much easier and safer to work on client web sites without endangering the live web site. And since you will be doing maintenance work on mostly simple web sites, the staging environment should not require a whole lot of custom implementations and administration.

What you end up with is a win-win situation for you and your client. The client can have their IT and web site maintenance needs handled by one business with whom they already have a trusted working relationship. And the IT company can add an additional stream of revenue with little change to their internal workflow and infrastructure.

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• Intervals Blog Listed in Top 50 Productivity Blogs To Watch in 2010 (1)
• Web Design vs. Print Design and the WIRED Interactive Magazine (3)
• Bootstrapping Your Creative Web Design and Development Ideas (2)

One of our Intervals customers, a design and branding agency named red meets blue, has written a marketing E-book entitled Succeeding in Turmoil and is offering it for free on their web site.

From their web site:

In response to the risk and the opportunity we see every day we have put together a very relevant E-book called “Succeeding in Turmoil”. It is very focused, well written and clearly identifies some strategies that could make an enormous difference to your immediate and long term prospects.

We highly recommend downloading and reading the E-book. And while you are on the redmeetsblue web site, check out their great portfolio of work.

Click here to download the complimentary PDF.

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• Web site maintenance: a revenue stream for IT companies in a weakened economy (2)
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The Editor of the Pacific Business Times has outlined five reasons why successful niche firms will help the economy rebound. Here they are below, along with our thoughts and experiences on each.

1. Employee empowerment
   On the flip side of having to wear multiple hats, owners and employees of a small business are able to take initiative. Self-starters are very effective within a small business. Our Pelago sidecar projects are evidence of this business trait. Our employees have created the notable open source offerings Sigmund and the Emogrifier.
2. Effective branding
   Small companies rely on highly targeted conversations with a highly targeted market. In other words, find a niche and pursue it. At Pelago, we did this early on and we haven’t looked back. An intimate understanding of the web design & development market is what has made our web-based project management application, Intervals, so successful for like-minded creative service firms.
3. Relationship-driven sales
   Established relationships with customers make it easier to sell products and services and to work together on recurring projects. Although these relationships can be complex, they are far more effective than cold calling and advertising. Most small businesses will tell you that referrals are the best source of business. Our web design and development projects have been referral based since the advent of Pelago nine years ago.
4. Cash management tools
   Controlling cash flow is probably one of the most difficult challenges facing a small business. It requires a lot of skill and consistency (a line of credit doesn’t hurt, either). Small businesses have learned to deal with fluctuations in cash flow on a daily basis. Fluctuations in the economy aren’t a far stretch from the norm. We’ve been dealing with them for years, certainly we can handle these lean times.
5. Constant innovation and entrepreneurial vision
   Small companies are always looking for new ways to present themselves. There is a lot of noise in the small business sphere and having a clear and succinct message can be critical to differentiation. We are constantly tuning and tweaking our message, our vision, and our appearance to the global marketplace. The goal is not to reinvent, but to stay fresh.

Perhaps the most important fact to remember is that the Rebel Alliance didn’t need giant AT-ATs to defend themselves against The Empire. All they needed were a few small and agile snow speeders. Here is to a successful 2009 for small businesses across the globe.

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