Ratio of time for website development vs. maintenance

[Vijay Patel]

I read an article a while back that related the average time needed to maintain a website with the time it took to develop said website. Alas, its not in my bookmarks. Has anyone come across anything on this topic?

[Heidi Cool]

I've never heard of anything along those lines. I suppose if you invest wisely in the development phase, adhering to semantic markup, Web standards, creating a logical navigation structure, etc. it will simplify the maintenance process, but otherwise I think content is the driving force. Does content change often? Can things be added to enhance the site? Those strike me as aspects of maintenance that are entirely independent of initial development.

[George Thompson]

I agree. After launch (with due diligence paid to the areas that Heidi mentions), it's all about content. Or ought to be.

Any relationship between development and content would be relative in the extreme. Are you only considering text? And then you have to consider the kind of content - whether it's news (which usually requires more updating), or seasonal (say per semester). How about video content? You have to develop a frequency of update for each kind of content that you have on a site.

[Michael Fienen]

My question is, what do you consider maintenance, and what's development. I spend a lot of time answering questions from contributors, which I would consider maintenance. And development designed to extend or enhance the site is pretty overshadowed, but we're just a two man shop. I'd say here, the ration is 7:1 maintenance to development.

[Vijay Patel]

Well, I guess anything that is post launch is maintenance. For the sites I manage I've established various maintenance cycles (copy, multimedia, technical updates, helping users...), these help us keep the site current. For example, we started out with simple image for a map, now using the google maps api we're pulling the map from google, there are a miriad of little things like that.

It took me and my team four months to launch a new site from start to finish. On average it takes us about 120hrs throughout the year to maintain the web site. Which translates to about 15% -17% of our time.

Do others have a similar experience?