admin | 
12 30th, 2009| 
We recently had our website redesigned. Everything is perfect about it, looks far more professional than our old one. The problem is, someone in our company has been up in arms about a monthly content management fee. I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all, as it allows us to control almost everything about our site. It’s never static, like our old site was, and it’s given us way better search engine presence. This is what they do for the fee:
-Host the site on a secure server
-blog
-discussion board
-add and delete pages
-eblast newsletter feature
-embedded videos and mp3s
-photo galleries
-complete store management system (can change specials daily, easily add/delete products, give out coupon codes, secure checkout, etc)
-email subscriber list manager
-customize keywords for SEO
-site visitor stats
-etc.
They’re also constantly checking up on us to ensure that the site is performing well and giving us advice on the wording, blogs, etc. I like the program because it allows us to do all of this with ease with no knowledge of web code, I feel it’s so easy, my grandmother could do it with no problem.
I can’t seem to get my partner to agree with this, however, and he thinks a monthly fee is a manipulative scam and insists that other web designers could give us all of this features without the fee.
Our old website didn’t have this fee but cost about a fourth more than the new one and didn’t have nearly the amount of technical support and was so unprofessional-looking, it was embarrassing.
I guess my main question is how to get him to see that the fee isn’t unreasonable. I’ve tried to tell him that web design is far more complex than he thinks but he seems to think he can go to school and design one himself.