Are Websites Eternal? The Longevity of a Website

What you'll learn in this episode

• The longevity of a website - is it realistic to assume they'll run forever without maintenance
• Complexity and its part in helping or hurting a site's longevity
• Budget-friendly maintenance practices
• The dangers of using easy-to-use features from service providers (SaaS) and tangling multiple together

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Topics

The Problem

• When you're making a website you're effectively making something similar to an "IT system"
• IT systems are appliances that the company uses to function (ie email server, VPN)
• These systems are usually more form over function as they need to:
  - Be available 24/7
  - Easily maintained
  - Quick to troubleshoot and fix
  - Easy to monitor (ie monitoring for problems with a bot)
• Whenever a system fails to reach one of these requirements it can spell trouble for whomever is maintaining it
• Most common systems that don't make the cut are:
  - Overly complex 
  - Too expensive 
  - Extremely proprietary (can't monitor with your own software, must use their subscription software)
• When it comes to a website/web app that is customer facing the similarities are:
  - Available 24/7
  - Easy to maintain
  - Quick to troubleshoot and fix
  - Easily monitored
• But because it's customer-facing the desire to go overly:
  - flashy design
  - using tools that are fast to use over functional
  - Tools that have no longevity (discontinued quickly)
• IT systems are typically boring though which doesn't lend itself to customer sales in a lot of cases so the demand for flashy is high - push and pull
• What type of longevity should you expect from your website?

The Considerations

• You have to pay a developer and designer
• Developers:
  - Build the designer's vision
  - Setup and maintain technical systems
  - Monitor and fix problems
• Designers
  - Create layouts based on requirements and modern trends
  - Trends change over time quite quickly (for the cutting edge)
  - Make and maintain brand identity 

• Budgets
• Future-proofing (ie new website every refresh or renovating existing systems)
• Old systems work but look boring, not updating frequently may make you look like you're falling behind depending on your competitors in your niche 
• Does your platform of choice get updates? To what extent? Security? Features? Both?
• Taking risks with new tools (ie frameworks) can give you cutting-edge features and methodologies, but can have support dropped quickly

The Solutions

• Research tools that have been tried-and-true through the ages for a cost effective solution that is still relevant today (ie WordPress)
  - The risk is that you may look like everyone else 
• Keep things modular where you can (ie is your content exportable into a CSV or other friendly format?)
• LTS versions of software (ie Ubuntu LTS)
• Disposable tech - quick to setup, fast to get old and be replaced (budget beware)

Links

• ‍Michael LaRocca
  - Author of the Self-Taught the X Generation blog, at selftaughttxg.com