It's always a shock. The value of a Web site is how current it is, but when a lot of sites launch, they're already over budget. An effective maintenance routine is the difference between success and failure for large publishing sites that change frequently. Annual maintenance costs in six or seven figures aren't uncommon. But for the majority of sites, maintenance is just like keeping house-a few regular chores, an odd job here and there, and the occasional flooded basement.
Many companies pay their design firms to do site maintenance, at costs that vary widely.
Tenagra Corp., Houston, includes a free half-hour of updating time per week in its hosting service, and lead designer Melanie Mitchell estimates most clients spend no more than a few hundred dollars a month on top of that. But designers report that an increasing number of companies want to bring maintenance in- house, and are willing to pay to get the tools to do it. The most common strategy is to confine frequently changing material to certain pages, for which the designer creates a template. New data is entered into a database rather than written directly in HTML, and the template gathers the material from the database. At least two design firms are now selling their updating tools commercially.