Keeping things running on a website, while not nearly as challenging as it was at the dawn of the Internet, is still a vital part of the web designer's job description.

 
Hackers, spammers, downed servers, bandwidth overloads, DNS problems, propagation issues and a host of other gremlins can all conspire to partially or completely disable a website. On the other side of the coin, so can stale, out-of-date - or worst of all - inaccurate content! In a perfect world, the handling all of these concerns would be the job of the guy who built your website - and if I'm your web designer, then that's the way it is. To date, I serve as webmaster to every single website I've ever built. It's a nice vote of confidence that I'm very proud of.

Lately, I've been working with a couple of clients for whom I've built-in a way for them to manage their own content. Through a password protected online administration panel, they're able to do simple editing like text replacement, style changes, even image uploading and cataloguing, all without my intervention. In these cases, I still handle large-scale design/structural changes and server maintenance for them.

I generally charge by the hour for site maintenance, and each site's rate is negotiated separately at the time of contract execution. Incidentally, maintenance charges NEVER begin until the site is complete and is publicly launched.