There's a particular kind of paralysis that sets in when you know your website needs work, but you're not ready to start a project with a capital-P. Maybe your budget is earmarked for other things this quarter. Maybe your team is stretched thin and can't absorb the lift of managing a full engagement. Maybe the timing just isn't right. But maybe, despite all of it, you still need an update… or more.

But nothing happens. The to-do list grows. The technical debt accrues interest. And the gap between where your site is and where it needs to be gets a little wider every month.

This is exactly why we built our Customer Success Program (CSP) at Edgar Allan. Not every problem requires a project. Sometimes what you need instead is focused, incremental help that meets you where you are—and that's what CSP is designed for.

The market is catching up 

Here's something we've noticed over the past few years: our clients increasingly understand that a website isn't a one-and-done deliverable, or a brochure you print and forget. It's a business tool that needs ongoing attention to stay effective. That's a meaningful shift. Agencies have long locked clients into support contracts that might start strong but then fizzle and even become barriers to improvements, so for a while, “no contracts; you can manage the site yourself!” has been a huge selling point. But now, teams are actively looking for support—not because they can't manage their sites, but because they recognize the difference between keeping the lights on and ongoing work that can move the needle.

The question is: What kind of support makes sense, and when?

Start with one thing

When teams come to us saying they need "everything," that's usually a sign they need to slow down and pick one thing. Not because everything isn't important, but because trying to fix it all at once almost guarantees you'll do none of it particularly well.

There's real power in single-track focus. So, we recommend clients pick the discipline that's most urgent—maybe it's SEO because their organic traffic has flatlined, or site maintenance because they’ve got a backlog of bugs affecting user experience, or content because half the pages are saying things that stopped being true a couple of product cycles ago.

Go deep on that one thing. Work on it. Learn alongside us. Absorb that institutional knowledge. Then decide what's next.

Our CSP tiers are built around this idea. Rather than scoping a massive project upfront, client teams get access to a blended group of designers, developers, and strategists who can flex with their priorities month to month for a set price. Start with what's most urgent. Expand from there.

Crawl, walk, run

If one thing at a time sounds too conservative, think about it like this: It’s not about lowering your ambitions. It's about ordering them in a way that really works.

A focused first phase of a project with this philosophy in mind might look like an SEO audit, fixing some technical issues, and optimizing a site’s highest-value pages. That's not super glamorous work, but it's the kind that makes an impact. A few months in, you've got baseline data. You know what's working. And now you can make informed decisions about whether to expand scope—maybe adding content production to support new keyword targets—or shift focus entirely because you’ve been able to see that the bigger gap is now somewhere else.

The point is: working this way, you’re making progress without having committed to a massive engagement upfront. You've bought yourself optionality. And you've built confidence—both in doing the work and in the ability to manage it alongside everything else on your plate.

Crawl, walk, run isn't a compromise. It's a strategy.

When this approach makes sense

Note that not every situation calls for incremental work. If your site is fundamentally misaligned with your brand or business model, you probably need bigger, more comprehensive help.

But if you're in that middle space—the site is functional but underperforming, your team is capable but stretched, the budget exists but isn't unlimited—a gradual, one-thing-at-a-time path is worth considering.

It's also worth considering if you're just not sure what you need yet. 

Starting with a focused engagement gives you time to figure that out without over-committing. You can always scale up. It's much harder to scale down from something that's already in motion.

Support you choose, not support you're stuck with

Here's the thing about ongoing agency relationships: they should be something you opt into because they're valuable, not something you're bound to because you can't update a hero image without making a call.

At EA, with the CSP, we’re trying to be invited in, not locked in. And locked in was what the old agency retainers were built on. What we're talking about today is really different. Our goal is to build full organizational change, where the knowledge of maintaining a site or improving an experience is retained within the company, and we’re there as an empowerment agent. Around to support, to be an extension of your team, but not to say, “Oh, you want to do this? Well, we’re the only ones who know how.”

The ultimate goal is building toward ownership, not dependency. We’ve found that some teams like to use CSP as a bridge while they hire or get up to speed on Webflow. Others expand the scope over time as they see results and want to dig deeper. Others ramp down, taking more in-house as they build capability. Many come back needing help with a “big” project, too.

All of these are success stories. The measure isn't how long the engagement lasts—it's whether you, as the client, are in a stronger position than when you started.

Momentum compounds

You don't have to wait until you're ready for everything to be perfect before making progress on something. And you don't have to know exactly where you'll end up to take the first step.

Pick one thing. Start there. And see what happens.

The website that gets incrementally better every quarter will outperform the one waiting for a transformation that keeps getting pushed to next year. 

Momentum compounds, but so does standing still. It’s your choice.

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