When building a website with Tourism Tiger, we work with you throughout the various stages of the process including design, content writing, and getting the site launched. After launch, we won’t simply give you the site and send you on your way without any support! Clients who build sites with us also have the option to subscribe to our monthly service, TigerCare(opens in a new tab), a comprehensive post-launch support system. While the Web and Design teams handle building, TigerCare steps in to launch the site and take care of it afterwards.
In reality, the TC service is much more than maintenance and monitoring, so we always schedule calls with new clients to introduce them to the service and everything it entails. TigerCare is an extremely valuable part of what we do(opens in a new tab), and also what differentiates us from other site design companies. For anyone looking for a new site with us, but on the fence about the monthly subscription that follows, this should clear up the ins and outs of the service and help alleviate any doubts.
Looking for more information about TigerCare, be sure to check out part two: Getting the Most Out of TigerCare(opens in a new tab)
How Does it Work
The service runs on a monthly basis and provides site support after launch to make sure that it stays up to date. The idea behind TigerCare is that we want our clients to maximize the lifespan of their site via the ability to make changes and updates. We see many clients come to us wanting a new site because they had someone build it for them a year or two back, and now it’s too difficult to change – or even worse, they have to pay extra every time they make a change!
We communicate mainly through email and all TigerCare members monitor a shared inbox. We are extremely proud to offer our service without any automated messages, our customer support is human! Of course, we also need speed to back that up. For the first 9 months of 2020, our first response times averaged out to 2 hours and 11 minutes, with our overall average response times averaging out at 2 hours and 41 minutes! We aim to fix most issues within 1-2 business days, but we actually have an average resolution time of 17 hours and 39 minutes.
What TigerCare Includes
On the Technical Side
Something that many people don’t see at first is that TigerCare includes advanced hosting. What this means is that we will take the site and store it on our servers – which is simple hosting – and then also take care of other items on top of that. We make sure the site is on a CDN(opens in a new tab) or Content Delivery Network so that it can be accessed globally at fast speeds. The SSL, or the security certificate, of the website, is also handled by TigerCare. We then ensure a force HTTPS protocol(opens in a new tab), so that no matter what people type in or click on to land on your site, once they arrive, they will load the site securely.
Apart from the speed and security of the site, our advanced hosting also includes updates to the PHP version(opens in a new tab) and WordPress version of the site to make sure that there are no delays or bugs coming from old code. The site is also backed up on a daily basis, so should anything happen, we can revert to the previous day’s version of the site. As you can see, we’re not just talking about storing the site on servers and calling it a day.
Content and Design Changes
The bread and butter of the service, as we like to think of it, comes from our unlimited content changes on the site. This is also the most visible part of how we ensure that our clients’ sites stay up to date. If you want to change a headline, update a tour, a contact or inquiry form, an image or video, remove anything from the site, (and the list goes on) we take care of it with a simple email request. Anytime our clients need content edited, we are there to make sure it is done. As our clients’ business needs change we are also there to support them – for example, if they need to integrate a new booking software. We encourage clients to look at their sites and send us changes as frequently as they can. It won’t shoot any site to the top of Google’s rankings, but keeping photos, testimonials, and content fresh on the site shows Google that the company is still relevant.
Apart from content changes, we also include small design changes in the service. Most commonly, these are changes to buttons or flexi cards, the structure of some pages or the menu, or overlaying some text onto images. Like the content changes, these small design changes are unlimited. The only restriction to design changes is that we cannot change the base colors or fonts of the site. The best way to explain this is to think of any building – let’s use the Empire State Building for example. The colors and fonts of the site are like the foundation of the Empire State Building. If you wanted to redo the foundation, you would have to take down everything on top of it in order to do so. (I am not a construction expert, but I assume if it is possible to change a foundation without taking everything else down, it would be extremely costly and complex.)
One Free New Page Per Month
In order to allow our clients to grow their sites as well as maintain them, we also have a policy of adding one free page per month. Whether they are adding a fresh new tour, or a new page about sustainable procedures, we are there to help. This policy runs on a no-rollover basis, which means if a client were not to ask for a free page in January, they would not be able to ask for two in February. To help clients understand, we always frame this policy as an offer to build a page for free that expires at the end of every month – and then we start the offer again at the beginning of every month.
We don’t do a rollover with this policy simply because we have a portfolio of 100+ clients. If they all waited until the end of the year to add new pages, at one page per month for 100 clients, that’s 120 new pages to be built – which is substantially larger than most sites! In order to complete such a request, we would have to stop everything else that our company does, which simply isn’t sustainable.
Customer Service Matters
Another key to allowing the clients to grow their sites is communication. We provide opportunities for clients to chat with us about how the business is doing, and where it is headed so that we can discuss what needs to be done on the website to accommodate any goals. Accordingly, we offer three review calls per year as part of TigerCare, so that we can have a back and forth conversation over video calls with our clients about things that don’t succinctly fit in an email. While we will go over site data and heatmaps in preparation for the call, the call is meant to be a platform for clients to let us know their plans.
We also urge clients to express any criticism they have of the service during these calls so we can acknowledge and improve upon any mistakes as we are always striving to improve. While we offer three review calls per year, this does not at all mean that we cannot have any other calls with clients. If a client, at any time, wants a call for back-end training, discussing plans, or even just chatting, they can easily request a call by sending us an email.
We Take Care of Your Site So You Can Focus on Your Tours
We want our clients to be able to operate tours without having to worry about the site, so we monitor it for them and perform regular site checks to see that nothing is broken, that things are showing up well, and that all the plugins are up to date. We use two separate monitors on each site so that if it goes down, we are the first ones to know and can work on getting the site back up as soon as possible. Along with downtime, we monitor blacklists to make sure the site does not appear on any (Google(opens in a new tab) and Norton(opens in a new tab) are the most common), and in the rare case that they do, we are able to submit a removal request within the hour of being notified that the site has been blacklisted.
Theme Updates
When you are on TigerCare, you also get access to any updates made on our custom theme, and better yet, we take care of updating the theme on your site as well. Updates take place every month, usually with new features available, but can also be related to security, speed, or SEO. A report is sent out to notify all clients of what’s new on the theme. For features that are not automatically added, they can be easily added with an email response to the report. With the custom theme also comes technical support on the site. We have a dedicated team of developers who built the theme, and work with us in the case that any bugs pop up. More commonly, however, we will see people asking to integrate certain services, plugins, or software, which is included in TigerCare as part of this technical support.
What does the service not include?
While what we include is important to understand the value of the service, there are a few key points worth highlighting in terms of what the service does not include. These are things that clients have commonly brought up in the past.
No Simple Hosting
As previously mentioned earlier, we do advanced hosting. Even if we were to cut the unlimited content changes, free pages, theme updates, and site monitoring we still wouldn’t be a simple hosting service. Along with storing the site on servers, we take care of security, monitoring, CDN, PHP, and WordPress versions. You would be hard-pressed to find a simple hosting service that includes all of these features.
SEO Experts
Clients commonly mistake TigerCare for a service that has SEO expertise. We do not claim in any way to be experts on the topic. The best way to explain our relationship with SEO comes from a recent example with a client. They had sent in a SEMrush report(opens in a new tab) (SEMrush tests factors on sites that can affect SEO) listing some errors and warnings on the site. The errors and warnings were not coming from content or metadata, but were coming from small technical issues that, not to our awareness, affected a site’s rankings. Those technicalities are the main reason we cannot claim to be experts, even though we have a solid base on knowledge related to other aspects of SEO. The beast that is SEO really is a service in and of itself, which is why there are entire companies and firms that specialize in deciphering all that goes into it.
On the other hand, something like this highlights the main purpose of the service, which is support. Using that report, we were able to find out what needed to be fixed in order to get rid of those errors and warnings. So, while we are not experts on SEO, if any of our clients were to reach out to an SEO firm that would tell them, “we need to do XYZ on the site,” we come in to help there. We do, however, offer additional services outside of TigerCare that focus on specific, key parts of SEO: keywords(opens in a new tab) and backlinks(opens in a new tab).
Social Media Managers and Digital Marketers
We also have clients who ask us about managing their social media, email campaigns, or other digital marketing related items. While these are areas of interest to our business, and we are always looking to adapt and expand our offerings, the reality is, we simply do not have the resources to perform such extensive digital marketing services as a part of TigerCare at this time. However, as with SEO, if anything related to a client’s digital marketing efforts requires changes or support on the site, we are happy to advise and aid in that part of it.
Blogging Service
Finally, TigerCare is not a blogging service. As part of the introduction to TigerCare that clients receive, we always share a video outlining how easy it is to add blogs to their sites. And of course, if there is a technical issue with the blog, TigerCare can help, but we do not write or publish blogs as a part of the service. However, blogging is an important tool(opens in a new tab) for sites, and we do offer a separate TourismTiger blogging service(opens in a new tab), just not as part of TigerCare.
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