A question about professional web-building and webmastering.

Hello ILX! You are very wise, and I know some of you work in this sort of thing…

I’m looking to have a website built and designed. It’s fairly fancy – lots of database stuff & etc.

The trouble is this: I’d imagine that this kind of fancy website is typically developed by a freelancer, and that you also need to employ some kind of professional webmaster, for when it breaks in unexpected ways (there is money for this, I think, although I don’t know how much such a person would cost). I presume it’s very rare for the webmaster to also be the person who actually designed the site, but I could be wrong about this? What level of support is customary from the person who did build the site, after the fact? I am sort of imagining the answer is none?

If you are a person whose job, in some capacity is, “have downtime be my fault”, at what point in the development cycle are you typically hired? What is the actual name of this job, and what are its responsibilities? Would you typically work at a concrete place, or be a vague presence at the end of a telephone line? This stuff seems weirdly opaque to find out.

(Also, does anyone have any glowing web-builder recommendations?)

ok so lol nepotism and all, but: i dunno if he's too tied up with other work atm but this guy's family and i know he can handle the database stuff and he'll build you a super clean and easy to navigate site. really easy guy to work with. and if it means potential business he'd probably be glad to answer some of these questions.

so what exactly are you working on? or are you not at liberty?

Working on an online education startup - same as every other bugger I suppose but hopefully with some unique ideas etc? Trying to make a budget for bank proposal and discovering how little I know about, like, real life has been pretty eye-opening.

Most freelancers will be more than pleased to work out a maintenance deal with you on an ad-hoc basis. You agree on an hourly rate. So if something needs to be fixed or changed you tell them what needs changing, they estimate how many hours it will take, and you pay them.

It would be cheaper to have them "hand over" the site to someone you work with who feels comfortable with web sites, but that's not always easy to come by.

That's interesting, Tracer - so a 'hand over' is an unusual way to do things?

No not at all! In fact it's the normal way to do things. But you seem to be in the unusual position of having a fancy database-driven website but not having anybody on staff who's a web developer. So that makes a handover pretty difficult. Usually you'd have somebody who could get a rundown of how it works, how to update it, and how to fix it if it breaks, and then that person could deal with things on an ongoing, ad-hoc basis. But without a person like that you'll need to figure out an ongoing maintenance deal with the person who develops it. Which they should be up for. The worst of all worlds is having someone develop it, do no handover to anyone and then vamoose, leaving you with a fancy website with no documentation for how to deal with it. When something inevitably breaks or needs fixing, the freelancer you hire will need a certain number of hours just to get up to speed with how the thing works.