A website is for life, not just for Christmas

There is a famous advertising slogan in the UK: A dog is for life, not just for Christmas.

A puppy might make a wonderful Christmas present, but it isn't really a Christmas present. It is a responsibility that lasts for many years. The excitement of Christmas morning is temporary; feeding it, walking it, looking after it and paying the vet bills are rather more permanent.

Exactly the same thing could be said about websites.

A website is for life, not just for launch day.

And yet we have somehow developed a habit of treating websites as though they are building projects with a clearly defined end. Someone decides that the organisation needs a new website, money is found, a designer is hired, developers are engaged, meetings take place, content is written, the site is tested and eventually there is a launch. Everyone congratulates themselves, the invoice gets paid and, far too often, everyone walks away.

The project is finished.

Except it isn't.

The project might be finished. The website has just begun.

A website is not a brochure that you print, put in a cupboard and forget about. It is software running on someone else's computer, connected to an internet that is changing constantly. The technology underneath it changes, browsers are updated, search engines evolve, security threats change, devices change and accessibility expectations change. And, if the organisation is doing anything remotely sensible, the organisation itself changes as well.

So the website has to change and evolve too.

But it still works

One of the most dangerous sentences you hear from company owners about an old website is but it still works.

Of course it still works. A website can continue displaying a homepage quite happily while the software underneath it becomes increasingly obsolete. The fact that you can open the website in Chrome and see your carefully designed homepage doesn't tell you whether the CMS is secure, whether the extensions are supported, whether the server is running a current version of PHP or whether your backups would actually work if you needed them.

It's the same as saying that an old car must be perfectly safe because the engine still starts.

Websites are particularly good at hiding their problems because so much of what matters isn't visible to the person looking at the screen. This is one of the reasons using a CMS such as Joomla is both a benefit and a responsibility.

Joomla is actively maintained. Security issues are investigated and fixed, bugs are corrected and the software evolves alongside the technology on which it runs. That's exactly what you want from the software powering your website. But those updates don't magically install themselves simply because Joomla has released them.

Joomla now has automated updates if you have enabled them, but it doesn't have automatic updates for every extension you might be using.

You need to pay attention when your hosting company tells you that the version of PHP you are using is approaching the end of its supported life. You need to know what you have installed and, ideally, why you installed it.

None of this is a criticism of Joomla. Quite the opposite. Regular updates are a sign of healthy software. The problem is not that your website needs updating; the problem is thinking that it shouldn't.

Your website doesn't know that it is out of date

There is another problem with leaving a website alone for years: the website doesn't know that it is out of date.

Your visitors might.

Imagine arriving at a website and discovering that the latest news article or blog post is from 2021. Perhaps the organisation is still operating perfectly well, but you don't know that. All you know is that the website appears to have stopped in 2021.

Or perhaps the website proudly tells you about a member of staff who left three years ago. Maybe the telephone number is no longer correct. Perhaps the opening hours changed during the pandemic and were never changed back. Maybe a product described on the site hasn't existed for two years.

None of these things necessarily require a developer to fix them. They require somebody to care that the website is still telling the truth.

That is an important distinction because website maintenance isn't simply about keeping the technology running. It is about keeping the website useful.

Content has a particularly nasty habit of becoming invisible to the people who created it. Once something has been published, it becomes part of the furniture and people stop seeing it. The person responsible for the website knows that the contact details are wrong because they changed them in an email signature six months ago. They know the opening hours have changed because the change was announced internally. They know the product was discontinued because they were in the meeting where that decision was made.

The visitor doesn't know any of that. They just see the website.

The website you built isn't the website you have

This is probably the bit that website owners find hardest to accept.

They remember the launch. They remember the beautiful design they approved, the carefully crafted content and all the testing that took place before everything went live. But that website doesn't really exist anymore.

The content has changed. The software has changed. The browsers have changed. The people managing it have changed. The organisation has changed. Even if you haven't touched the website, things around it have changed.

Doing nothing is not the same as keeping it unchanged.

It means allowing everything else to change while your website stays behind.

Eventually the gap becomes noticeable. Perhaps an extension stops working. Perhaps an update can no longer be applied because the site is too many versions behind. Perhaps a security problem appears. Perhaps the website looks increasingly dated compared with competitors. Perhaps visitors simply stop finding it useful.

And now what was once a small maintenance job has become a major redevelopment project.

This is why regular maintenance is usually cheaper than occasional rescue. Keeping a website reasonably current is boring. Bringing a five-year-old website back to life is not.

Who actually owns the website?

Every organisation should know who is responsible for the website?

I don't mean who owns the domain name. I mean who is responsible for it now?

If the answer is the agency that built it, what happens when the contract ends? If the answer is Dave in IT, what happens when Dave leaves? If the answer is marketing, which person in marketing actually has responsibility for making sure the software is updated and the backups work?

What happens when nobody notices that something has gone wrong? If nobody owns the website, this is where everything starts to go wrong. Ownership is not the same as having a website developer on staff or on call.

A developer might be responsible for maintaining your website, but responsibility needs to belong to the organisation. The website is an organisational asset and it shouldn't depend upon one particular person remembering that it exists.

Someone needs to care whether it is still secure, whether the information is still accurate, whether the software is still supported and whether the website is still doing the job it was created to do. A website developer can't be expected to know if a product has been discontinued or there has been a price increase. Their job is to update your site with the information you provide. You cannot and should not rely on them to know everything about your business.

The website budget doesn't end at launch

We should stop asking How much does a website cost? A better question is, How much will this website cost us over its lifetime?

If you spend £10,000 building a website and then spend nothing maintaining it for five years, you haven't saved money. You've simply deferred the cost.

The software still needs maintaining. The content still needs updating. Security still matters. Search engines still change. People still use the website. Eventually somebody will have to deal with all the things that have been ignored.

A website isn't expensive because it needs maintenance. It needs maintenance because it is important enough to have a website in the first place.

If the website doesn't matter, why did you spend £10,000 building it?

A website is for life

The Dogs Trust slogan works because it reminds us that buying the puppy is the easy bit. Websites deserve the same reminder.

Launching a website is the easy bit. The difficult part is accepting that the website is now an ongoing responsibility. It needs attention because the world around it doesn't stand still. It needs updating because software changes. It needs new content because your organisation changes. It needs reviewing because your visitors change. It needs improving because nobody gets everything right the first time.

And sometimes it needs completely rebuilding.

That's not a failure. In fact, I'd argue that a website which has been regularly maintained, improved and eventually replaced has been far more successful than one that was launched with great fanfare and then forgotten.

So by all means build a beautiful new website. Choose Joomla. Choose something else. Choose whatever is right for your organisation. Spend money on good design, good content, accessibility and security.

But when the launch party is over, don't walk away.

Because the website isn't finished.

A website is for life, not just for Christmas.

And unlike a dog, when it needs attention it won't even bark.