A trade website does not stop working all at once. It goes out of date in pieces, and each piece slips quietly enough that nobody notices until a customer does.

The same photographs, year after year

The bathroom fitted five years ago is still the newest bathroom on the site, because nothing has replaced it. The tiles shown are a pattern that stopped being stocked long ago. A customer who has seen other kitchens finished this year in a similar style has no way of knowing the business is doing that work now, because the site is still showing the work it did then.

Areas that were true once

The list of towns covered was written for a working radius the van has since grown out of. The business now takes jobs further afield, and the site has never said so. See Areas Covered, and the Page That Is Wrong the Moment the Van Goes Further for what happens to that page as the radius grows and the wording does not.

A price that has moved without the page moving with it

Call-out charges and day rates change, usually upward. A page still quoting last year's figure is not lying on purpose, but a customer who rings expecting the number on the screen and hears a different one starts the call on the wrong foot.

A registration renewed somewhere the website never sees

Bodies such as Gas Safe Register or NICEIC deal with renewal directly with the tradesperson. The certificate gets renewed. The badge on the site, and the number sitting next to it, stay exactly as they were on the day the site was built, because nothing connects the two.

None of this is fixed for good by one rebuild. Each part ages again on its own schedule: the photographs when the next job finishes, the areas when the next job further out gets taken, the price when the next rise happens, the registration when the next renewal comes round.

Keeping a website current means going into it every so often and changing something: a photograph, a price, a line about which towns you cover. None of that takes long on its own. The problem is finding the moment to do it.

Where the time is supposed to come from

The person who could update the site is usually the same person quoting a job, driving to another, or finishing one before dark. Sitting down to log into a website and edit a page is not part of that day. It is not urgent in the way a burst pipe is urgent, so it waits, and the next job arrives before it gets done.

This is not a question of organisation. It is a question of where the update sits in the list of things a working day contains. A task with no deadline and no immediate cost for skipping it will always lose to a task that has both.

What upkeep actually involves

Kept up properly, a trade website needs someone to do a few specific things on a repeating basis:

• Add new job photographs as work is finished, and take down ones that no longer represent current standards or pricing
• Update the areas listed as covered when the working radius changes
• Correct prices or callout charges when they change
• Update scheme registration numbers when they are renewed or when the scheme itself changes

None of these is difficult. All of them require someone to notice the change has happened in the real business, then go and make it happen on the site as well. That second step is the one that gets missed.

What happens instead

Left alone, the site does not break. It just stops moving while the business carries on. The gap between what the site says and what is actually true grows slowly enough that nobody decides to ignore it. It simply accumulates, one missed update at a time, until the site is describing a version of the business that no longer exists.

A trade website does not need to sit still after it goes live. The Living Site at webdesign.uk is an arrangement where someone else keeps a site built by the practice current, updating the photographs, the areas covered, the prices shown on the page and the registration numbers as the business changes.

Build price and monthly price

The Living Site has a build price for the site itself and a separate monthly price for the ongoing work of keeping it current. The two are stated apart because they answer different questions: one is what it costs to have the site made, the other is what it costs to have someone else keep it moving afterwards. The current figures for both are published on webdesign.uk.

The monthly part is optional

Taking the Living Site is not a condition of having a site built. The monthly element can be cancelled at any time, and the terms for doing so are stated alongside the price on webdesign.uk.

Which sites this covers

The Living Site is for sites built by the practice. The practice does not at present take on sites built elsewhere, so a site built by another company is not something the Living Site can be added on to.

See the current build price, the monthly price and the cancellation terms at webdesign.uk.