Managing a Town Website: Why Ongoing Support Matters More Than the Build

The dirty secret of web agencies

Here's something most web agencies won't tell you: building the website is the easy part. The hard part — the part that actually determines whether your investment pays off — is what happens after launch.

I've seen it too many times as a councillor. A town spends months going through procurement, selects an agency, waits six months for the build, has a nice launch event... and then the problems start.

The agency moves on to their next client. Support requests take days to get a response. Small updates cost £100 a pop. The CMS is so complicated that nobody in the council office knows how to use it. Within a year, the website is out of date. Within two years, it's an embarrassment.

Why town websites fail

Town websites don't fail because of bad design or poor technology. They fail because of bad support. Here's what typically goes wrong:

The content goes stale

Events pass and nobody removes them. New shops open and nobody adds them. The "What's On" page shows events from last summer. Visitors arrive expecting a food festival that happened three months ago.

Nobody knows how to update it

The agency trained one person during the handover. That person has since left the council, retired, or simply forgotten how the CMS works. Now the website sits there, frozen in time, because updating it feels too difficult.

Fixes take too long

Something breaks — a form stops working, an image won't upload, the events page throws an error. The council emails the agency. Three days later, they get a response asking for more details. A week later, the fix is applied. Meanwhile, visitors have been hitting a broken page.

The agency disappears entirely

This is more common than you'd think. Small agencies fold. Developers move on. The council is left with a website built on technology nobody understands, with no documentation and no support contract.

What good support actually looks like

At TownStack, we think about support completely differently. We don't build a website and walk away. We stick around because a town website is a living thing that needs ongoing care.

Here's what that means in practice:

Same-day responses. When something breaks, it gets fixed fast. Not in three days. Not next week. Today.

Content management options. We can train your team to update the website themselves, or we can manage the content for you. Most of our towns choose a mix — they handle the simple updates, and we take care of the technical stuff.

Proactive updates. We don't wait for things to break. We keep the technology up to date, monitor performance, and make improvements based on how visitors are actually using the site.

AI that helps. Our AI-powered event listings mean your events page updates itself. No more stale content. No more manual data entry. The AI finds local events and publishes them automatically.

We understand councils. This is the big one. I'm a serving councillor myself. I understand committee cycles, budget constraints, procurement processes, and the pace at which councils move. I'm not going to get frustrated when a decision takes three meetings. That's just how it works.

Questions to ask your web agency

If you're in the process of choosing an agency for your town website, here are the questions you should be asking:

1. What's your average response time for support requests? (If they can't give you a number, that's a red flag.)
2. What happens if we need to update content? Is that included?
3. How often do you update the underlying technology?
4. What happens if our main contact person leaves?
5. Can you show me a website you built two years ago that's still well-maintained?
6. Do you specialise in town/council websites, or is this a sideline?

That last question matters more than you think. A generic agency might build you a perfectly nice website, but they won't understand why your events page needs to be managed differently from a corporate blog, or why your business directory needs to be easy for shop owners to update themselves.

The long game

A town website isn't a one-off project. It's a long-term commitment to your town's digital presence. The agency you choose isn't just building you a website — they're becoming a partner in promoting your town for years to come.

Choose carefully. Look for expertise, responsiveness, and a genuine understanding of what makes town websites different. And above all, look for someone who'll still be there in year three.

Want to talk about ongoing support for your town's website? Get in touch — I'm always happy to chat about what good support looks like.