The website matters.
What it says, how it performs or how useful it is has a meaningful effect on the business.
Website Stewardship
When the problem isn't a project.
The website doesn’t stop changing when the project ends.
A new website can be right when it launches. An improvement project can solve a real problem. SEO can increase visibility.
Then the business changes. Services evolve. Customers behave differently. Marketing tries things. Pages accumulate. Priorities shift.
No single change has to be wrong for the website and the business to gradually drift apart.
Website Stewardship is about having someone responsible for noticing when that happens — and helping decide what to do about it.
Someone stays responsible for the website as a whole.
I stay close enough to understand what is changing in the business and what is happening around the website.
That means we don’t have to start from scratch with a new brief every time something comes up.
I help work out what deserves attention, what doesn’t, and when action is worthwhile.
When something does need to happen, I help make sure the right response follows — whether that involves me, your existing people or someone else.
Website Stewardship makes sense when…
Things keep changing.
The business, its customers or its marketing create recurring questions about what the website needs.
Nobody owns the whole question.
You may already have marketers, developers, designers or an agency. But nobody remains responsible for whether the website as a whole is still serving the business properly.
Continuity would help.
There is value in having someone who already understands the context when the next decision comes along.
I work with a small number of Stewardship clients at a time. That’s deliberate — the relationship only works if I can stay close enough to understand the business and remain properly involved.
What does that mean in practice?
There isn’t a fixed quantity of website work to manufacture every month.
We stay in touch about what’s changing. I keep an eye on the website and its performance, help think through priorities, challenge proposed work when necessary and spot things that deserve attention.
I can help brief or work with existing suppliers and make smaller agreed changes where that makes sense. Larger pieces of work are scoped separately as Website Actions.
The constant is simpler: someone keeps asking whether the website is still doing what the business needs it to do.
A Website Action ends. Stewardship stays involved.
A Website Action is a defined piece of work. We agree what needs doing, do it, and the project ends.
Stewardship is for the businesses where the underlying need doesn’t end with the project. Things will keep changing, new decisions will come along, and it is useful to have someone who already understands the context when they do.
It isn’t a bigger version of an Action, and it isn’t a maintenance contract keeping the site running. The value is the continuity: the question of what the website needs doesn’t get forgotten between projects.
Think Website Stewardship might fit?
Tell me a little about the business, the website and how it's currently looked after.
Talk to me about Website StewardshipI’m Alex Magill, founder of Bold Wise.
I’ve spent more than 25 years working across websites and digital products — as a designer, developer, UX practitioner, adviser and generalist working between technology, communication and business.
Website Stewardship draws on that breadth. I’m not there primarily to run your marketing, maintain the technology or keep an agency busy. I’m there to understand enough of the whole picture to notice when the website and the business are pulling apart, help decide what deserves attention, and make sure the right response follows.
Sometimes I’ll do that work myself. Sometimes I’ll work with your marketers, designers, developers or agency. The important thing is that someone remains responsible for the question as a whole.