(source: jef safi)

We don’t provide hosting, we don’t have licensing fees and we don’t require a maintenance plan when building a website with us. So why does BFM offer maintenance plans?

Simply to make your lives easier, however we can. We will help you set up the best hosting plan, monitor your hosting, make back-ups of your website and more.

Why might your website need a maintenance plan?

For certain companies, they don’t have time or the manpower to make updates to their website, so we are here to help when needed. It might be a few hours a month to update new products or it might be 20 or 40 hours a month to update latest news or a blog on a weekly or daily basis. Whatever it is, your point of contact is here to be sure the content of your website is always up to date and fresh.

What if you don’t have updates to the site on a daily, weekly or monthly basis?

Internet browsers update everyone once in a while and when they do, you’ll need to tweak your website. According to W3Schools.com, the most recent browser usage stats show people are using a number of different browsers:

Internet Explorer 7 = 18.7%
Internet Explorer 6 = 14.9%
Firefox = 47.3%
Chrome = 6.0 %
Safari = 3.1%
Opera = 2.1%

Each one updates every so often and when this happens it is necessary to update the code of your website. For example, Microsoft recently updated Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox is now onto version 3.5. We recently had to update coding on a lot of our sites as Google Chrome was recently released, and is a growing browser. It is very important that your website is compatible with these new versions so users see the best face of your company online.

These are a few examples of the types of problems that have arised when browsers update and the code of the site has needed to be tweaked:

The top banner on the homepage was not centered was a problem that Myspace had when some users browsed with IE7. Myspace was using the “clear” property in IE7, which provided this version of the site with a unique CSS style. This was not necessary in IE8 and caused this problem.

CNN.com had a empty white comment box on the corner of every page when some users browsed in IE7 because they were using an IFRAME element that needed correcting.

What about older browsers?

At the time your website is launched with BFM we take care of testing the website on all major browsers, new and old, Firefox to Opera. BFM includes this quality assurance phase in each of our client’s agreements.

Our Maintenance plans range from set up and monitoring of hosting, to making back ups, monitoring the server, and continually providing edits to the site. We are here to help in any way we can, small or large, we take responsibility for the success of your website.

Tags: back-end coding, browser compatibility, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Maintenance plans, website architecture