February 14, 2025
No matter the size of your organization, managing a website on your own is a challenging, neverending effort. Today’s sites incorporate multiple complex components and systems. A single missed technical connection on one side of your system generates all sorts of issues on the other.
This responsibility is especially difficult if you work in higher education or at a nonprofit. Whether your site is managed by communications or IT, your teams are already stretched too thin with their responsibilities. Who has time to plan a software update or investigate a dragging website when you’re swamped with deadlines?
And that’s why agencies like ours offer ongoing support and maintenance programs to organizations like yours. But unlike a lot of agencies, we prefer to go a step further with a program we call Continuous Care.
The meaning of Continuous Care and how it works
Fundamentally, our approach to Continuous Care at Four Kitchens is derived from two core values: “Take Action” and “Always Improve.” In all our projects, we work to proactively identify opportunities, solve problems, and search for a better way. With those ideals in mind, “support” really is just the beginning of the kind of service we offer.
When you sign up for a support plan with most website development agencies, you’re ultimately paying for someone to answer the phone (or respond to an email) when something breaks. And when issues like platform updates or security patches arise, you can rely on your support team to handle the regular maintenance today’s websites need.
Naturally, our plan includes support for bug fixes, upgrades, and site issues. But through forward-thinking recommendations, Continuous Care provides you with more of a strategic partner.
How Continuous Care serves your organization’s goals
A website is your organization’s most powerful communications tool. Continuous Care ensures it continues to serve your audience while we collaborate with you on a plan for how it can better serve your users as well as your organization and its goals.
Whether your website needs a platform update or any other essential improvements, we can create a roadmap that will get you there — in a way that works for your budget. Continuous Care provides proactive support in the following ways:
Outlines technical details in ways your organization will understand
With Continuous Care, you gain dedicated collaborators in setting goals for your site. Along with gaining an experienced, big-picture perspective on your organization’s needs, you also gain the technical expertise to get your website on track. Our program includes two layers: A project manager and a technical team, both serving as crucial points of contact for your organization.
While the role of a project manager is more familiar, your technical strategist is led by an engineering lead who communicates with the developers working on your project. Your technical team also works with you to gather the information we need to identify and anticipate website issues. Then we can create a plan for future development.
The technical team plays a vital role in guiding you and your team through website enhancements. If you’re managing your organization’s website but maybe less familiar with its technical demands, your team will offer clear, easy-to-understand choices for how to resolve any issues that arise.
When you’re presented with multiple potential solutions for a website issue and all of their pros and cons, you’re more empowered as a site manager. Plus, with a team handling the technical details, you’re free to focus on the other important, mission-critical work on your calendar.
Frees IT and marketing teams from finding solutions to site problems
Gaining a support team through Continuous Care enables you to better focus on the longterm goals for your website rather than searching for the right solutions for its issues. In fact, we work best when you don’t come to Four Kitchens with specific ideas about the functionality or features your site needs. Don’t worry about solving your problems for us—just tell us what your organization is trying to do.
Rather than investing time and energy to pursue a solution you or someone on your team may have in mind, we’d rather tap into what issues you need to resolve. The question isn’t completely technical.
What is happening in your organization that’s shifting your digital needs?
Do you have new executive leadership?
Has your website strategy changed?
With questions like these in mind, the discussion of your website and what you need becomes more focused.
When you’re working with a website partner who thinks proactively, you can better identify the problems behind your current issues. And better still, you can more quickly identify and address the problems that lie ahead.
Continuous Care keeps your organization on track for the future
Part of what makes websites so complex to manage is the fact that they can never be seen as “complete.” And the technology that supports your site isn’t the only aspect of your site that is evolving and moving forward — your users and your organization are, too.
At Four Kitchens, we can audit your existing site at any stage of its lifecycle. Whether your site launched a few months ago or a few years ago, it remains a work in progress. Even if your organization is dedicated to an issue that’s dominating the news cycle and you’re in crisis mode, the right partner will ensure your site continues to serve your mission and your audience. With a Continuous Care plan, your organization gains a clear set of priorities for what’s ahead. That way, wherever your site needs to go next remains within reach.
If this sounds like the kind of comprehensive and collaborative support that you need, we should talk. We’ll work with you on a plan that will take your site where it needs to be.
Making the web a better place to teach, learn, and advocate starts here...
When you subscribe to our newsletter!
* indicates required field