Wednesday, 11 February 2009
You’ve had your website up and running for a while and it’s working fine (though it’s probably getting a little dated), but lately you may have heard that updating your site could be a good idea. Budgets are tight, the economy’s in the tank and you may be wondering if this is really something you need to do or not. Well, I don’t intend to tell you how to allocate your marketing budget, but I can tell you what you may gain by doing that update now.
The reason you’re hearing so much about updating websites is due to the numerous changes that have taken place in how websites are built over the past few years. You may not see or understand the difference, but it’s huge and it matters. Short history lesson. When the first wave of web development happened, the tools available for building those sites were pretty limited and so designers and developers created “ways of doing things” that often worked, but on the technical side, wasn’t very efficient. Fast forward to the present. Web standards have come a long way making it possible to design and develop sites much more efficiently. All the complaining about not being able to do “this or that” and companies who have resisted adopting web standards is now fading into the past. I’m not saying things are perfect, but they’ve gotten way better.
So here’s what a new site will do for you. Thanks to CSS and XHTML, content and design are now separate. This means that if your content is still good, you can quickly and easily (read less expensively) update your design. Freshen your look without going through a complete redo. This can be as simple as just changing your color scheme. Another benefit is that your file sizes will be smaller, due to less code and therefore your site will be a lot more zippy, making your visitors happier. Future updates will be easier and faster because the code is based on standards, not some convoluted mess that someone hacked together. Also with standards comes better accessibility to different platforms and browsers, including be those used by the disabled. Lastly, search engine optimization (SEO) is naturally enhanced, because standards based code is easier for search engines to read. This will make you site easier to find automatically.
Clearly, there are advantages to catching the second wave of web design and development. Is it the right time for you? Only you can decide, but keep in mind that while everyone else is waiting out the storm, it could be an excellent time to get ahead of your competition.
