Maintaining and Supporting an Enterprise Website

Many organizations come to us with a website that is in a state of disrepair and asks us to redesign and relaunch the website. The reality is that you can redesign your website for many reasons, and poor functionality is only one of them.

More importantly, you don’t have to let your digital properties reach a broken state before redesigning and relaunching. Many organizations, even the largest enterprises, overlook the need for support, maintenance, and monitoring after launching their digital projects.

With the amount of time and money that goes into the project, these post-launch considerations are necessary for protecting your investment. Let’s go over some of the key areas to focus on when futureproofing your website project.

Supporting an Enterprise Website

Organizations that contract an agency to deliver a digital project usually have their own highly skilled digital team. The reality is that most teams, even within large enterprises, are not large enough to deliver a project within a realistic timeframe.

This means that the agency acts as staff augmentation during the design, development, and launch of the digital project. However, once the project is complete, your organization’s digital team shrinks back down to its original size.

The internal team then manages updates and maintenance while addressing critical issues. Sometimes, this strategy is sufficient for keeping a website functional and useful. Other times, without a contingency plan, it can lead to disaster.

Enterprise website support is a simple way to protect your website from failure. A dedicated support team is available when you need it, whether for critical issues, staff augmentation or simply to ensure modules are kept up to date.

When an urgent issue arises and your digital team is asleep, who will answer the call? Critical website failures are incredibly costly to your business. Without the right resources in place to tackle the problem as soon as it occurs, it can quickly spiral out of control.

In addition to critical issues, dedicated support teams can maintain and update your website, allowing your digital team to focus on higher-value projects.

Maintaining, Updating, and Upgrading your Website

An often overlooked, but critical aspect of digital projects is maintenance, including updates and upgrades. Maintaining a website can mean many different things, and it’s crucial to cover all of your bases.

An enterprise digital property can consist of thousands of pages and even hundreds of sites. Maintaining a holistic view of your environment and ensuring everything is up to date can be impossible. A dedicated support team will ensure that every module, plugin, and security vulnerability is updated and patched out.

Enterprise digital teams are most valuable to their organizations when they can focus on high-value and high-impact projects. A support team can take the menial tasks off your developers’ hands and free up time for the most important tasks.

When selecting a support team to maintain your digital investment, it’s crucial to choose a team with the right expertise. Many agencies build a support team that manages a number of technologies without specialization in any particular area.

Why would you want someone supporting your technology without being an expert in that technology? Our support team at OPIN specializes in Drupal so that we can provide the highest level of support to our clients.

A team that is fully focused on the technology that you use will ensure that best practices are followed, security issues are patched and upgrades are applied immediately.

Continually moving to the latest version of your technology will increase the longevity of your digital platform and maximize the return your organization derives from the investment.

Another incredible asset of a technology-specific support team is the training they can provide. Our team of experts frequently train enterprise digital teams on the specifics of Drupal, allowing them to support themselves in the long-term.

This enablement is not just beneficial for developers, but also for content creators, administrators, editors, and every end user. To truly maximize the ROI from your digital platforms, all stakeholders must have the ability to take advantage of features. Finally, training can help drive your organization’s digital vision.

So many new ideas, features, and enhancements come from a deep understanding of what the technology currently does. By becoming experts in the technology, your digital team can start building a vision for the future of your digital strategy.

Monitoring your Entire Digital Footprint

Your digital footprint includes many key areas to monitor, even within a single website. A combination of the right tools and the right people is necessary to ensure every area is running smoothly. A website investment is only worthwhile if it delivers results for your organization.

To meet the goals of your marketing and communications team, you have to stay on top of content, security, and analytics.

Content monitoring becomes more important as a website ages. Over time, thousands of content pieces are added to the site, and it becomes impossible to ensure content policies are enforced.

The simplest problem is “broken” content, which can mean that content doesn’t load properly, or that links on your website are broken. The implications of these issues for user experience are obvious, but content challenges can go far beyond this.

First, accessibility compliance is a legal requirement for many organizations. Ensuring that colours, images, fonts and meta content are optimized for accessibility is a monumental task when you have thousands of content pieces.

Delivering accessible content is required, but you also need your audience to see the content. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a fickle thing, with search engines constantly changing their algorithms and the need to frequently update content.

Accessibility is a requirement that is increasingly becoming enshrined in law. In many places, however, data and security compliance has already been regulated for many years.

There are endless stories of enterprises being fined millions of dollars for data breaches or non-compliance. Serving a global market means complying with GDPR, CASL, CAN-SPAM and more at the same time. Ensuring data is managed correctly on a large scale is difficult but feasible, while managing data on an individual basis is nearly impossible.

To avoid fines and lawsuits, you have to ensure you are honouring every data request made by your audience and customers.

We’ve highlighted the key areas to consider in order to maximize the longevity and the value of your digital project. These areas can all be categorized as support or monitoring.

When making decisions about the right support structure and the right monitoring tools, you need to know what your options are. Whether we built your digital project or not, we can help you get the most out of your Drupal platforms.

We also offer an enterprise monitoring solution that encompasses every aspect of your digital footprint