‘Set and Forget’ Websites Are More Expensive Over Time

Why do people struggle with this? A website that consists of an attractive design and introduces a functional component justifies launching it. People believe that this represents the completion of a project. Sadly, this is far from the truth. Websites that aren’t altered for years continue to fall behind. Although visible issues may not exist, there are significant problems that are not apparent in everyday use.

There are many issues that emerge over the years that impact a website negatively. Search engines will eventually notice and demote your website to a lower position on search engine results pages. This is detrimental to the website and may go unnoticed until the traffic decreases. Visitors will notice the discrepancy. Competitors may provide advanced websites with features that were once consider innovative. If your competitors provide opportunities for customers to place orders and view orders through secure password-protected areas, whereas your site lacks these features, customers will view your competitors as a better alternative.

Security needs to be a priority. Websites that have not been altered for years have outdated features. This makes a website more vulnerable to breaches. Avoiding preventable risks that can cripple your business becomes more costly to resolve in the future.

Continuously investing in enhancements either through a monthly subscription, annual review, or allocation of budget for upgrades, pays off. Using a product, regardless of how long it has been implemented, can help you avoid revenue loss. It can also assist you in customer retention and avoid lengthy repetitive work. Also, when you make significant product improvements, don’t keep those improvements to yourself. You must tell your customers. An amazing and unique product feature will not benefit you if your customers do not know that feature exists.

A website is similar to any other business expense. If you treat your website like any other business expense and maintain it, it will continue to benefit you.

The Bug Nobody Can Find: A Developer’s Guide to Staying Calm and Carrying On

It is the nightmare of every developer. Something breaks. Frustrating, especially when it is a new build that you are rolling out. Images won’t scroll, and forms that you know worked yesterday are not submitting today. These problems happen to everyone.

The first instinct, more often than not, is to jump back into the code. This is never the better option. It is more likely to be a non-code, simple oversight. These oversights can have a significant impact and are the hardest to find. It is always better to go over basic and fundamental assumptions.

For your own sanity and productivity, it helps to avoid breaking things on the live site. You should set up a dev/testing site to work on problems. Then you can try as many alternate solutions as you want, then simply delete the dev site if you need to.

But if you can’t solve it, give up for a while. You probably feel like you should incite some mild self-torture by continuing to work your brain, but you really just need a fresh set of eyes. Set a timer to leave it for at least an hour, but preferably overnight.

You’ll probably find the solution in a matter of seconds. It’s rare for a bug to be the sign of a systemic design flaw. Take this time to reset and clear your mind. The answer will pop in front of you.

There are a couple of other things I need to get done, and then we can discuss the wording and layout of broken dev content. Do you want an actual word doc of the content, or do you want a single, consolidated, content pack?