A few projects, looked after over time.

Properly looking after someone takes time, and time doesn't multiply. So I work with a few clients at once. It isn't snobbery: it's the only way to do a few things well instead of a lot of things halfway.

Before I say yes I look at one thing: whether where you want to get to looks like where I'd take your business. If the vision is the same, the work flows. If it isn't, it shows within a few months, and by then it's wasted time for both of us. Better to say so up front.

So the first conversation is as much for me as for you. Here's what I'm looking at.

• —What kind of growth you have in mind, and over what sort of timescale.
• —Whether you're willing to change how you do things when the numbers say you should.
• —Whether the site and the advertising are genuinely part of the business, or a box to tick.
• —Whether I can be any real use. If I can't, I'll say so and point you somewhere more useful.

They're two different things, not a dear one and a cheap one. Put plainly.

• One-offyou buy a piece of work with a start and a finish. On handover it's yours, and the relationship ends there. It's clear, it's measurable, and you know exactly what you're spending today.
  Subscriptionyou buy the fact that someone is looking after it. The work has no end, it has a rhythm — every month something is fixed, added or dropped, based on what the numbers say.
• One-offmaintenance, updates and anything that breaks after handover are down to you, or to whoever you ring next.
  Subscriptionmaintenance is included and isn't renegotiated every time.
• One-offthe result is the one you got on handover day, and it sits still while everything around it moves.
  Subscriptionthe first month's result is the starting point, not the finish line.

A site doesn’t break the day after handover. It wears out slowly, and almost always quietly: a form that stops sending without telling anyone, a page that goes sluggish because the catalogue has grown since, a Google position dropping a rung a month.

It isn’t about how well it was built. A site lives inside things that move on their own — phones, browsers, search engines, what your competitors are doing — and sooner or later something shifts. What makes the difference is whether somebody notices while it’s still small.

How much this part weighs depends a great deal on what the site has to do. A static business card can sit there for years untouched, and that’s perfectly fine. A site that collects enquiries, sells, or has to rank is another matter: there the real cost isn’t building it, it’s keeping it in shape.

I’ve written up three concrete cases — the form that had stopped sending, the rankings that slipped away, the site left behind — in a separate article.

Read the three stories

There's no point selling a subscription to someone who wouldn't use it. There are cases where one-off work is simply the right answer, and I'd rather be the one to say so first.

The rule of thumb is straightforward: the harder your site works for you — enquiries, sales, visibility, things that need updating often — the more it needs someone keeping it alive. If it's a static object, treating it as a static object is perfectly fine.

• —You need a business-card site: one page, static, saying who you are and where to find you. No forms, no catalogue, no sales. Built properly, it'll sit there quite happily for a good while.
• —You have one specific job with a clear start and finish: a page for an event, a migration, a catalogue to load.
• —Someone in your business already looks after it. If you've got a person who knows their way round the site, you don't need to pay for another.
• —You want to try before committing. Fair enough: start with something contained, and if it makes sense to carry on, we talk about it then.
• —The budget won't take a fixed monthly cost right now. Better one job done well than a subscription that starts to feel like a burden after a few months.

If you've read this far, you've probably already worked out which of the two you are. If you haven't, that's exactly why a conversation is worth having.

Write and tell me what you do, where you are now and where you'd like to get to. I'll look at your situation and tell you honestly what makes sense: an ongoing relationship, a one-off job, or nothing at all for now, if what you've got is fine as it is.

If you'd rather start with something small and concrete, we can begin with a check-up: I go through the site, the numbers and your competitors, and leave you a document listing what to do, in order of what matters most. That's one-off work, and it's absolutely fine if it stops there.

I'm the one who answers.