Why do sites die

I want to say at once that under the word “sites” I will mean not high-load web applications, but small “sites”, developed for small and medium-sized companies. These are mainly promotional sites and online stores. For most companies, this is the first experience of buying a web application. And not every customer is ready to allocate for the development of a sufficient amount of money (and sometimes temporary), which leads to very poor results.

I have some experience in website development. Recently I work as a freelancer. He has already managed to participate in the development of websites of various cost, even free ones, for his practice. But what a bad luck, most of the sites die either immediately, or continue their imperceptible useless existence to no one. One only noticed that the sites for small companies, live a little longer than the sites for more or less large. But these are just my observations, perhaps you have the opposite.

Small companies

I have some hypothesis about my observations. The representative of a small company on the part of the customer, as a rule, is its director ( or his deputy, that is, a partner ). This person already knows how much he is willing to spend on development and is ready to vary the budget if necessary. It is easy and quick to work with this person, since he himself makes decisions, and does not send them up.

After the development, the customer either agrees to long-term cooperation for a fee or starts to maintain the site himself. For the first few weeks, he himself looks at the attendance counters several times a day. He writes or copies material for the site from somewhere, shows it to all his friends and relatives. But after a couple of months, his fervor subsides, and he is already reducing his activity. It is good if during this time his sales increase at the expense of an online store or his company is accredited to a bank through a website. But this is not all so fast . And not everyone is ready to wait.
')
Each developed site has an administrative part in which the user can manage the content. Various CMS were used, both self-written and commercial. And as it turned out, this factor does not affect the “vitality” of the site. In various CMS there were both complex administrative panels and light ones - without any frills.

Medium-sized companies

Medium-sized companies identify a person who oversees the development of the site. As a rule, he knows only what budget to fit into and what kind of material the company is going to post on the site. This person finds the performer and talks about the materials that are supposed to be posted on the site. And it happens that is limited to the phrase "We need a website." Having found out the budget, the contractor begins to offer options for the implementation of the declared amount. And then the development process begins.
After the process comes to the final stage and the customer is ready to accept the work, the very moment comes when the newborn site begins to die. What awaits him? Who will support him? At best, it was filled with the initial content, which through thorns was achieved with the customer.

Recently, I have often noticed that studios are trying to impose website promotion for a newly created product. Thus, they prolong his life for six months or a year, or a little more. But what will happen when the company stops paying for the services of the company, deciding to reduce costs? Most likely, the site will be transferred to the management of one of the employees of this organization. Perhaps this will be the manager who oversaw the development, and possibly the admin, since he understands these computers most and will deal with the site ( there have already been such cases ). In any case, the chance that this will be a competent and experienced person is negligible .

Big companies

As for large companies ( from 250 people ), I have no experience with such. If someone has, please share in the comments.

But, anyway, most sites die. Probably, this can be called “natural selection”, but I call it “unfinished work with the customer”. Not a single developer wants his offspring, in which he has invested so much energy, once died. And let him be adequately paid for the work, it doesn’t matter, but what’s important is that he lived for a while on this project. How now to prevent death?

Options

I tried to carry out explanatory work. In oral form. In writing. But it does not work. Explained that the site requires regular updates and agree with that. However, more important things do not allow to allocate time for this work.

I tried to be a free consultant. As a result, no complaints followed. The reason are all the same very important things. Unless the questions for which they consulted were from the series “Why do so few people come to the site?”. Explanations and recommendations did not lead to anything.

In cases with online stores, the situation is partially solved by database synchronization. But besides this, the sites have sections such as a blog, faq, contacts, or even a forum that simply need to be moderated.

What are some other ways to work with a client that could avoid the sudden death of newborn sites?