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Blizzard’s Changes and Maintenance Team stays very busy with helping our clients keep their website content fresh and up to date. Typical change requests include, but are not limited to, updating lodging specials or packages, updating or adding seasonal rates, adding current events, and updating photos. The maintenance team also handles such things as adding a link to a third-party booking system, building new pages that don’t require extensive work to the navigation, and looking into broken links or other problems with the functions of a site.

Since the requests we receive can vary so much, yet still fall under the umbrella of “maintenance”, we would like to offer a simple set of guidelines for the types of work that should and should not be considered “changes”, and what kind of time total our clients in the hospitality industry can expect to have spent on various common tasks. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that all of a certain type of request will always take the same amount of time; the structure of a site, the type of content, and the type of navigation on the site are just a few of the factors that can lead to a change taking more or less time.

Some general information and time estimates:

• Every change we receive is going to involve at least:

1. Opening the change request e-mail
2. Reading and interpreting the request
3. Opening the client’s account in our database, doing a quick scan of it, and looking for outstanding issues with the site or account
4. Completing the work
5. Publishing the site to the server so that it can be viewed on the internet.
6. Reviewing the changes on the live site for accuracy
7. Replying to the client’s e-mail

• Photos/images: We estimate about 8-12 minutes per photo when adding photos to a site. Adding a photo involves opening the photo in a image editing software (usually Adobe Photoshop), formatting it to the correct proportions and size, balancing color or other ‘cleanup’ on the photo, and saving the photo in the correct format and compression to ensure a quick load time. Photos that are sent by regular mail require additional time for scanning. Sending very large or very poor quality images, or ones in a very different format than the image they replace, can add more time to this step. Any image that requires adding graphics or effects (drop shadowing, photo corners, colored borders, or soft or faded edges) will also add extra time to each photo placement. Furthermore, photos that “click to enlarge” require formatting the photo twice; once for the small version and once for the larger one.

• Text changes: Text changes can vary quite a bit; some are as simple as cutting and pasting a word, but they can run all the way to adding whole columns of text with specific formatting (bulleted text, bold and italics, hyperlinked text, or specific coloring). The more complex a block of text to be added is, the more time it will take to add to a site. A common misconception is that we can simply cut and paste any text into a site directly from e-mailed information; text copied with formatting from Word, WordPerfect, or even an e-mail with rich text effects could generate bad code if used on a webpage, so the formatting must be reproduced.

• Navigation structure: The navigation of a site can be a factor in how long it take use to make changes. Navigation is the set of links that allow users to select where in a site they would like to go. Some navigation is simple - a mere text link; other forms can be very complex, as in full Flash, drop-down sub-menus, or rollover effects. When we make a change to navigation, it may need to be reflected on all pages on the site, or may involve rebuilding graphics or writing code; seemingly small changes can end up taking a lot longer. When submitting changes to navigation on your site, please be aware of these variables.

• A few more details: Even if we don’t actually change anything on the site (a client has a question we need to answer, for example) we still need to bill for the time needed to complete steps 1-3 and 6 above.

With this in mind, please also remember that we must bill for the time it takes to make an estimate for changes; we get a lot of requests for an estimate before work begins, often so that a client can spread the work across a few months to have it included in allotted (free) monthly maintenance. Frequently, generating an estimate will take just as long as actually doing the work, and we cannot always generate accurate estimates without getting into the work and seeing what exactly will be done. Please use the above guidelines to estimate the required time on your own.

You can save time, and money, in the long run by putting all of your changes together in one e-mail, since that cuts out duplicate steps from the above list - if we do five requests from five separate e-mails, you might be billed for the minimum five separate times; if you send five requests in one e-mail, you will only be charged for that time once.
Please also take the time to make sure that your request is clear and not confusing to us; use the actual page’s URL (example: www.yoursitename.com/pagename.htm) to ensure that we work on the correct page - using terms like ‘the third page’ or listing the link to the page where the change needs to be made (example: “on my homepage there is a link to the policies, please change to ‘four night minimum”) can add time while we search for the correct page, or reply to your e-mail asking for more information. Please also avoid vague changes such as “please add the attached photo to our site”; we will send this request back to you for clarification and we will charge for the time we use to look into the issue and reply.

When we work on a site, we may find other details that require our attention, including some work that may add to the total time to process the request. We have a very large number of clients and an even greater number of websites that we work with; we don’t open sites at random to make sure everything is as it should be; if we open your website and find that it is generating errors, is not functioning properly, or has very outdated information, we will take the time to fix these issues and bill for that time. This is especially good to keep in mind if you either don’t look at your site regularly or if you have not requested any changes for a while. Of course, any errors or issues that are determined to be Blizzard’s responsibility for any reason will be fixed free of charge.

For more details on our Changes Policies, go to www.blizzardinternet.com/hosting/policy_hosting_maintenance.htm.

Matthew Ballance - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

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Categories: Design.
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