Websites can sometimes be like cars. Some people prefer to get the newest model every few years or so, to keep up with the technology and enjoy the latest features. Other people will drive a car into the ground, using it for years and years, until they literally can't drive it any more.

It's hard to say that one preference is necessarily better than the other, but arguments can be made for both. On one hand, changing to a new model every so often can be more expensive. On the other hand, staying with the same thing year after year can deprive you of advances in technology and features that you might find useful.

If you've had your website for a long time and you're wondering whether you should upgrade your site, here are some things for you to consider:

Responsive Websites

It may be hard to believe, but less than 10 years ago, most people had never heard of an iPhone or a smartphone. It's been even less time since most people owned an iPhone or a smartphone. Now, however, they're everywhere and people use them to do everything from making calls to taking pictures to watching videos...to visiting websites.

The problem is that there are websites that were created five or ten years ago, or more, that did not take into account the explosion in smartphone use. These older websites were designed to be viewed on desktop or laptop computers, with wide screens. As a result, a lot of these older sites are not easily readable or usable on smaller devices like smartphones and tablets.

Recently, within the past 5-10 years, more and more websites have adopted what is called "responsive design." This is a way to program websites so that the same website will look slightly different depending on the size of the screen with which you're viewing it. If you're seeing the website on a desktop computer, all of the elements may be spaced out across the width and height of the page. But if you go to that exact same website on a mobile device, the elements will appear as a list, so you can scroll down it. In either case, the fonts will be big enough for you to read without having to pinch or zoom with your thumbs.

If you have an older site, take a look at it on a smartphone. If you find yourself having to use your thumbs and fingers a lot to expand the page and move around it, that means your website visitors are having to do the same thing. Because so many people these days expect a website to be "responsive," they may be annoyed at yours if it's not.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engines like Google and Bing are constantly updating the algorithms they use to determine which web pages get listed higher on their search results. Some of these changes reflect changes in user habits. Other changes reflect the ways in which web developers have tried to "game the system" by overusing or misusing keywords. If you want your website to get (or maintain) higher rankings on search results, you should constantly be reviewing ways to update your site for maximum SEO.

Security

The languages that web developers use to create websites have changed and matured a great deal over the past 5-10 years. Many of the advances in those languages have addressed security vulnerabilities that hackers used to gain access to secure areas of people's websites. This means that your older site might be vulnerable to attack.

Often, it's not an actual person trying to poke around on your website to find security holes to exploit. In many cases it's a program somebody has written, based on common, well-known security vulnerabilities, that scours the web to find easy targets. Older websites are often more susceptible to these attacks than newer ones. Updating your site can help you close up those vulnerabilities and make your site less susceptible to tampering.

Design

Fashions change constantly, and what was "in" just a short time ago can seem embarrassingly out of vogue today. Styles change in the world of web design as well. In many cases this may not be a problem, but if the goal of your website is to reach an audience for whom fashions and styles matter, you should always keep your website up-to-date. Otherwise, your competitor's more stylish website may be pulling all your visitors away.

Flat Files

Some much older websites are comprised of what are called flat files. These are files in which the code for every web page is contained within a single file. Why is that a problem? Imagine you have a website with 100 web pages and you want to change the color of your site's banner from green to blue. You have to go into every one of those 100 pages and make that change.

Modern websites (that is, websites created within the past 10 years or so) have been built with more of a "modular" approach. What this means is that the code for, say, a website's header sits in one file, and every page on your site uses this file rather than having a header of its own. That way, if you want to change something in the header, you change it in one place only (the header file), and that change becomes visible on every page of your website.

There are many other advantages to moving away from a flat-file-based website architecture. If your site is still pulling up flat files, you should definitely consider updating to a more modern approach.

Contact me if you would like to explore renovating your existing website.