Who updates the website after delivery? How to organize content and responsibilities

A website ages in a predictable way: first an outdated price, then someone who no longer works there, then a service you no longer offer. None of these mistakes come from a technical problem. They come from the fact that, at delivery, no one decided who changes what. Deciding it beforehand costs one conversation; deciding it later costs a customer pointing out the mistake.

The question "can we edit the content ourselves?" has a short answer and a long one. The long one is the only useful one: which content, who approves it, and how often someone remembers to check it.

Three types of change that get confused

Lumping them together produces two opposite and equally unpleasant results: sites that stand still because every change needs the vendor, and sites that break because everyone can touch everything.

• Editorial: changing a text, a price, a photo, adding an article or a person. Low risk, high frequency. These need to be doable independently, or they won't get done.
• Design: changing a page's layout, a block's colors, the type of element used. Medium risk: a change designed for one page can clash with the other twenty.
• Technical: adding a function, modifying a form, working on performance or platform updates. High risk, low frequency. These stay with whoever has specific expertise.

The criterion isn't how hard it is to press the button, but what happens if the change is wrong. A phone number typed incorrectly is fixed in a minute. A block moved on a template shared by thirty pages isn't.

Roles and permissions: few and clear

In a normal-sized company, three levels are enough, and it's worth resisting the temptation to create six.

• Who writes: prepares and saves, but doesn't publish.
• Who publishes: checks and sends live. Usually one or two people.
• Who administers: creates users, touches the structure, decides on exceptions.

The most important permission is the one you don't grant. If everyone can edit everything, sooner or later someone will change the wrong page thinking they're in a different one. Limiting access to the sections a person actually uses isn't distrust: it's reducing the number of possible mistakes.

Approvals: how many are actually needed

An approval round for every comma turns autonomy into a request for permission, and at that point you might as well call the vendor. It's worth distinguishing by content type, not by person.

• No approval: fixing typos, updating a set of hours, replacing a photo with an equivalent one.
• One-person approval: new service copy, articles, project descriptions.
• Multi-person approval: prices, sales terms, regulatory data, and anything that can have contractual consequences.

Components and instructions: making changes repeatable

Content is easy to update when the site is built from repeatable pieces, not from pages that are all different. If a service block is always built the same way, whoever fills it in the second time already knows what goes where, and the result doesn't clash with the rest.

Useful instructions are short and tied to specific operations: adding a person, publishing an article, changing a price, replacing an image. One sheet per operation, with the steps and the point where people usually go wrong. No one opens a forty-page manual; four sheets, they do.

The responsibility matrix

It makes explicit what usually stays unspoken. The example is illustrative: the entries need to be adapted to your company, but this is the format.

The worst-filled-in column is always the last one. "When needed" isn't an answer: no one notices a price is outdated until a customer points it out, and by then the report has already cost something.

Scheduled checks on information that goes stale

Not everything on the site ages at the same rate. It's worth keeping a short list of the information that becomes false on its own, and scheduling checks on that.

• Prices, rates, terms, and stated timelines.
• People, roles, direct contacts, and email addresses.
• Services no longer offered and discontinued products.
• References to regulations, certifications with expiration dates, third-party trademarks used with authorization.
• Links to external pages, which can disappear without warning.

Two or three checks a year, with a responsible person and a date on the calendar, are worth more than a generic commitment to keep everything up to date.

What this guide doesn't cover

This guide covers the company's ordinary content management. Switching to a different vendor — what to ask for, what needs to change hands, how to verify you really have everything — is a different matter with its own guide. Building reusable components, as the site grows in pages and departments, is also covered separately.