If it’s not fresh, it ain’t worth having…

Wise words from Godbit, who are stressing the importance of being able to update your site.

This is all too often an area that people overlook. Rabid in their desire to get a good looking site live as soon as possible, they forget about the week after it launches. And the week after that? No chance. That’s why I tell my clients from the off that I’m a web developer, not a secretary, and my aim is to give them the power to update thir sites.

It doesn’t always work out like that, some sites don’t need anything more than a few static HTML pages. Yes, I said it; not all sites need to be database driven. But all sites need to be fresh, and the easier it is to update a site, the more chance there is that the client will actually update it.

Two bad examples:

1) A client who insisted – and paid handsomly for – the ability to update their site. Six months later, nothing had changed.
2) A site where the news articles were full page images. If people find it difficult to keep even the text on a site up to date, how are they expected to master a graphics program? And that’s not even thinking about the accessibility issues.

And two good examples:

1) The client who keeps asking for more features to be added to their CMS becase the more they use it, the more they want to do, and the more popular their site gets.
2) The site where a large group of writers are constantly adding new content – there’s always something new to read, the site is never the same two visits running.

One more thing: broadband = happiness :0)