They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
-Confucius
It’s easy to think of your website as a building, or a statue. You decide you need it, you draw up some plans, and you build it. End of story. Yet sometimes it’s more helpful to think of your website as a tree, or a garden. Start small. Grow it. Change it often.
If you launch a website and get 1000 visitors, that’s great. If you never change that website, those people will only come back perhaps once or twice. They will not tell their friends about your website. They will not remain interested.
A website that offers a slightly different experience every time will be much more successful. If you change or add to your website every week, it may benefit your visitors to come back every week. They are more likely to remember your website, and they are more likely to tell their friends about it.
Sometimes, clients approach us, wishing to have their website updated. If a website cost $5000 to build, and we only need 10% of the content to be changed, it should only cost us $500. Or so the reasoning goes.
If you take this approach with a house, tacking on a porch here or a carport there, you end up with the kind of place I happen to live in right now. Nothing fits. The additions are obvious. It no longer looks attractive.
Worse, imagine that your website was built a few years ago. Perhaps the designer was lazy, and didn’t use very good techniques when building your site. Maybe they didn’t use modern standards like XHTML or CSS, but instead used the HTML code generated by a program like Dreamweaver or FrontPage. That can make it really, really hard to maintain the website. It’s like using different materials to build different rooms in the same house. It doesn’t work well, it doesn’t look good, and you’re going to end up hating it.
Think about the future when you build websites today!
