Site maintenance is the most important aspect of building a successful destination. Many factors affect the amount and type of updating you wish to provide for your site, and unless it is a simple advertisement or personal homepage it's important that your site be interactive and offer new content on a regular basis to bring back visitors.

Feedback plays an important role in this equation, you have to eye your position on searches for information similar to what your site contains, solicit comments from users of other types of computers and browsers, make sure the links on your site aren't sending visitors to old, obsolete URL's, and study the statistics you receive from your server statistics and listings of referrers that you can get from other sources.

In short, your web designer should be willing to take the time to educate you or someone in your company to the world of editing and writing HTML and uploading files, which is really all there is to most of it. On the other side of the coin, there may be many niche services, such as artwork, scanning images for the web, screening and answering customer emails, or the simple drudgery of updating prices, content or the promotional submission of your website to other sites to increase traffic that you may well wish to leave to a third party. Remember that putting your email address on a web page is an open invitation for mountains of spam and nuisance comments and questions!

Once your site is designed and built, you should have all of the tools you need to change and update it as needed, and not be beholding to the designer for any further assistance, unless you wish to add newer sophisticated features to it. This means you should have all of the software you need to access your server and modify files using your username and password from anywhere. You should also keep a complete local copy of your site on your own computer, so you can experiment with changes and content before uploading them.

Some do not want to get involved in maintaining their site and would rather contract these functions to the design agency who are often the hosts, or employees of the hosts of the site itself. There is a conflict of interest in such arrangements, because your host will not necessarily be interested in promoting your site, if it means increased bandwidth expenses for them. This would result in them having to charge you more to host the site, which may chase you away!

There is really little need to leave the entire control of your site up to only one someone else, and a great danger in making such arrangements. Another hidden danger is that, in the process of explaining your great new process or concept to their employee or associate, that information somehow becomes news, or is brought to market on another website! Make sure you get a signed Confidential Disclosure Agreement before you blindly entrust your plans to others!