Website maintenance

We're asked from time to time what we do between new projects. We're actually busy maintaining a number of websites for our clients on a regular basis. These tasks have been going on for a long while for some of our clients,in one case up to twelve years! These maintenance tasks range from simple updates to development of additional functionality.

In this day and age you would have thought that there's no room for a web development company to maintain existing sites! There are some significant advantages though for some companies as, by using our services, they do not need to have in-house resources such as HTML programmers, graphic designers who can ensure the site keeps its look and feel and does not get broken. We are in a way acting as a human Content Management System (CMS) for our clients! This is a very cost effective use of resources as we do things effectively given it's our core business activity, leaving our clients to deal with their own's. Our knowledge of the client's site and our technical experience mean the tasks we carry out are cost effective. As we know the sites well we are often in a situation where we advise our clients on how the information should be presented on their websites.

A few examples....

St Albans District Council

We have been maintaining the site since its first appearance on the Web in 1995 or thereabouts. The site has been redesigned and re-engineered several times since of course. The continuous involvement of EAB in the Council's e-government activities over the years has earned us the title of "Strategic Partners" (IEG).

The Cathedral of St Albans. We initially designed the site some ten years ago now (and it shows its age of course!) but the site has been continuously updated. For instance the Music list has been religiously updated every month. For a couple of years we worked with the Cathedral staff to develop and maintain a dedicated site for the Cathedral Campaign which helped to promote the campaign aiming to raise £6M.

Hertfordshire Visual Arts Forum

Apart from the ongoing updates of the news & gallery pages we also do the Open Studio programmes. This year's programme has just gone live and, guess what, you're just in time to visit the page and schedule a few visits to your local artists!.

The Radlett Centre

A regular programme update takes place every quarter since the site went live many years ago.

Drop me a line if you would like EAB to look after your site, or if it's the case, to let us re-engineer your site with a Content Management System so at least you can update it yourself on a regular basis without the need for in-house technical expertise.

Summer 2007 Holidays

Given the time of the year, here's a brief and somewhat different post!

Summer holidays are over for me. With my wife and my daughter we stayed 15 days or so at my Dad's house in St Martin du Var, a small village some 15 miles behind Nice.

This break was an opportunity to get away from computers and the Internet (this was made easy thanks to the smartphone paying a short visit to the loo just before we left and I forgot to take the power brick for my laptop....) and enjoy seeing my family, the warmer climate, brighter skies of the French Riviera, not forgetting the tasty local food, wine, mountain scenery, the warm sea when you get used to it that is!).

Our daughter decided that beach was going to be compulsory every day, so we ended up visiting beaches in Nice, Cagnes and Antibes to add a bit of variety...

It was also an opportunity to meet with old school friends (from the 60's!) including Jean-Jacques Beltramo, artist photographer (visit his website), and an EAB's client.

It was interesting to see the French newspapers praising the UK for its investment in research. It seems that the Universities across the Channel are underfunded and many of the few researchers prefer to go and find better careers in the UK or US. However, all imports of meat products from the UK are stopped...

View a few photos of this visit to the French Riviera.

Hope you enjoy the selection and do get in touch if you would like one of the photos!