Why you can't edit your own website (and what that's costing you)

There is a specific kind of website problem in the property sector that almost nobody talks about, because admitting it is embarrassing: the firm cannot change its own website. Not "finds it fiddly". Cannot.

How it happens

The site was built somewhere between 2008 and 2016. Maybe by a local one-man web outfit, maybe by somebody's nephew, maybe in a desktop program the principal bought on a disc. It worked, everyone moved on, and the site sat there quietly earning its keep.

Then the person who built it retired, or stopped answering, or the software was discontinued. Serif WebPlus, a desktop web builder that was genuinely popular with small UK firms, shipped its final version in 2016 and switched off the online services its sites relied on in August 2018. Any site built with it is now a static export from a program you can no longer buy, edit with, or get support for.

From that day, every change to the site means finding the original project file, a working copy of dead software, and someone who remembers how to use it. So changes stop. The "latest news" box says 2019. The featured property was let three years ago.

The quiet costs

Stale listings do the opposite of marketing. A unit that was let in March still sitting on the site in November tells every visitor the firm is asleep. Applicants stop checking the site, which means the phone is now your only channel, which means enquiries only happen during office hours.

You may not even own the domain. In a worrying number of these cases, the domain was registered by the developer, in the developer's name, on the developer's account. If they disappear, so does your web address, and every board, business card and email signature that carries it.

The mystery direct debit. Many firms pay a hosting charge every year to a company they could not name, for a server they could not locate, protecting a site they cannot change. Nobody dares cancel it.

How to check where you stand, in ten minutes

1. Open your website, right-click, choose "View page source", and look near the top for a line containing the word "generator". If it names a program rather than a platform, note the program and look up whether it still exists.
2. Search your domain name at a WHOIS lookup service. Check whose name and email the registration sits under. It should be yours or your firm's, not a third party's.
3. Ask yourself when the site last changed, and who did it. If the answer to either question involves someone you can no longer reach, you have found the problem.

Getting out

The fix is not "a nicer design". It is ownership. A rebuilt site should hand you three things on launch day: the domain registered in your own name and account, logins to a system where adding or amending a property takes minutes, and a written handover naming where everything lives. If a proposal does not include those three, whatever it costs, you are renting your own website again.

That is how we build. If you want to know what your escape would cost, request a quote and we will tell you in writing within a working day.