If you would like to take over or transfer the management of your site, you’ll need to consider the following:

• Hosting. You’ll need to establish a contract and working relationship with a hosting provider. There are many hosting providers out there, some are very good while others are poor. We’ll happily advise and guide you appropriately.
• Domain Registration. This is usually managed by your hosting provider, but doesn’t have to be.
• Software Licensing. Various top notch software packages are required for each website we build. Our software licences are not transferrable, and you would need to purchase your own.
• We’ve spent many working hours sourcing the best software packages, and eliminating those that don’t work well. Training on these packages is not provided, and we don’t offer a facility to assist you with these as you go.
• Once the site management has been transitioned, you’ll be responsible for maintenance and support of your own site. Any consultation from Digital Trails will be charged at a standard hourly rate.

Arrangement can made for access to general business areas, so you can work on your online store products, blog posts, certain photo albums, etc.

As part of our website management service, we do allow for several small changes each month. We can quickly and easily implement these changes for you as you request them.

As we are primarily responsible for the stability and integrity of your website, we ensure that no additional parties access the back-end of the website. This means we don’t allow our clients to have administrator access to the back end.

Photos are often the most important component of any website, and awesome photos can make a massive difference to the appeal of your institution.

Typically, photographs in websites will come from various sources. Sometimes from a professional photographer, our own dedicated photographer, stock photography or our clients very own photos.

When supplying us with photos, you need to confirm that you own the rights to the photos. This means you can’t download photos from other websites for your own use. We take no responsibility for photographs obtained without proper permissions.

Please have a look at our dedicated photographer’s website here.

We have an account with Deposit Photos. They have a good library, and are reasonably priced. If you find photos that you like, please take note of the reference numbers, and let us know. Other free stock photo websites are: unsplash.com, pexels.com and freephotos.cc .

If you supply your own photos, please ensure they are uncropped and of high resolution and quality. We always edit submitted photos, and starting with a high resolution allows for better editing and more flexibility with cropping. If the photos are in RAW format, this is even better.

Photos downloaded from Facebook, other social media or from WhatsApp are of poor quality and not usable. Please ensure the original photos are sent via email, in their maximum resolution and file size.

If you need to send photos from your phone, please use an app called Telegram. This is similar to WhatsApp, but doesn’t compromise photo quality as you send them.

Any other questions, please contact us here.

We can’t give a firm guideline right now, but once we’ve discussed and planned properly, we should be able to give a rough idea.

Each case is unique, it depends on the technology used, and how well it’s been built.

We mostly work with Divi and Elementor on WordPress. We don’t work with Squarespace and Wix.

Each website would need to be assessed before we can confirm and quote for a Care Plan maintenance package for your website. Click here for more info.

Our standard hosting is with Xneelo (formerly Hetzner), and is the Basic Shared Hosting option. This is ideal for most small businesses, personal sites, etc. For larger businesses with busy websites, there are various options available, which offer higher capacity and performance.

Xneelo servers are based in South Africa and Germany, so we’ll pick the location that suits you.

We can also work with other hosting providers based in the UK, US and parts of Asia. If the need arises, we’ll determine the best option to suit your needs.

The following are included in our Care Plan website management package:

• General website support
• Email setup
• Software updates
• Software licensing
• Uptime monitoring
• Daily backups to two locations
• Disaster recovery
• Website security
• SEO Maintenance
• CDN
• Small changes

Click here for more information on our Website Care Plan.

Take for example, digitaltrails.co.za . This is the domain name that we’ve obtained and registered. We are the registrant of the domain and owner of this domain. It gets renewed every year. If we don’t renew it, we’ll lose ownership, and someone else can register it for themselves.

Behind the scenes of this domain, information is stored, and this will ‘tell’ the internet where my site is hosted, emails should go, etc.

We manage the domain registration for all our clients, so you’ll never need to worry about the nitty gritty of this.

Once a domain is registered, all the information for the website needs to be on a computer somewhere. This computer is essentially referred to as the ‘website host’.

For South African websites, where most of the site visitors are based in South Africa, it is best that this host is within South Africa itself. This will make our websites less dependant on the long undersea cables that stretch the length of Africa, allowing them to perform better for local users.

If the bulk of your clients are abroad, it’s probably better to host outside of South Africa. This will allow your website to perform faster for your overseas clients.

There are also more advanced methods such as CDN and Cloud Hosting, which distributes content across the globe, allowing your site to perform well to a global audience.

Yes, pretty much any domain can be hosted anywhere you like. So .co.uk sites could be hosted in South Africa, and co.za sites could be hosted in the UK, US, Asia or where ever appropriate.

I know… it’s annoying… but it has to be there.

If you’re going to attract visitors from the EU, which you almost certainly will, then we’ll need to abide by GBPR rules. One of these is to have the visitor accept that you use cookies on your website. Feel free to Google GDPR, there is loads of useful information on the internet.

If you’re curious as to what cookies actually are. They are short pieces of information, stored at the back end of your website, for use when you come back to pages you’ve visited before.

It’s obviously a lot more complicated than the explanation above. If you’re really curious, please Google it.