Initiative 02 — Care and growth retainers: staying after launch

01Launch is the middle of the story

The day a site goes live is the day it starts to drift. Dependencies age, a form stops sending, a marketing page gets added without checking how it loads, and a client discovers the problem when a customer mentions it. The studio that built the site is usually the worst-placed to fix it, because the engagement ended at launch.

A care plan exists so that the person who understands the code is the one who answers when it stops working.

02What a care plan will cover

Three layers, each with its own rhythm. The first two are automatic; the third is where the value actually sits.

1. Watch — uptime, broken forms, failing scripts and page-speed drift, checked continuously and reported monthly.
2. Maintain — dependency and security updates, backups verified by restoring them, certificate and domain renewals tracked.
3. Improve — a reserved monthly block for the small changes a site always needs: a new section, a faster image, a clearer enquiry form.

03The monthly rhythm being designed

A retainer fails when nobody can say what it bought. The month below is the shape we intend to run, with a written summary at the end of every cycle so a client can see exactly what the plan paid for.

1. Review

   Week 1

   Read the monitoring report from the previous month, triage anything flagged, and confirm nothing is quietly degrading.

2. Maintain

   Week 2

   Apply updates and restore-test a backup. Anything risky is scheduled, not pushed on a Friday.

3. Improve

   Week 3

   Work the client's chosen item from the improvement list, in the reserved block.

4. Report

   Week 4

   A one-page summary: what changed, what is next, what we noticed and are not changing yet.

04Response times we will publish

We will commit to a reply window, not to an availability we cannot staff. A small studio that promises round-the-clock coverage is promising something it will quietly fail to deliver. The published number will be one we can hit on a bad week.

1. A reply to a reported fault inside the agreed window, every working day.
2. A written diagnosis before any chargeable fix begins.
3. An escalation path that names a human, not a queue.

05What we will not promise yet

Some numbers only become honest once you have measured them. Rather than copy an uptime figure off another agency's page, we will publish ours after the first months of real monitoring and say which site it came from.

No uptime guarantee until the monitoring has run long enough to produce a real number. No unlimited-changes tier — that is how quality dies.

06Who the plan suits

Not every site needs a retainer. A one-page brochure with no forms and no ambitions may be better left alone, and we will say so. The plans are for sites that carry weight — enquiries, bookings, a catalogue, or a brand that cannot afford to look broken.