A Rant on the Changing Company Website
I don’t want to go off on a rant, but… Every day it feels like technology is going further, but yet getting more complex for the user. This is even more true for the technology driving business websites. We know… We’re developing between 3-6 websites at any one time, while maintaining 40 or so more – so, you could say we’re in the trenches.
Website technology has advanced at a rapid pace from text and colors, then on to full HTML (this is when I jumped on the website bandwagon), then it was XML and Flash, and on to .asp, and on and on to now. Remember your first construction company website? Today’s modern websites aren’t just built for desktop, they now need to work on all mobile devices while having the plug-ins that run CMS platforms like WordPress. It no longer takes years for your site to become outdated or vulnerable to malicious bad guys, it now takes just a few months. Go ahead… don’t update those plug-ins on a regular basis, and see what happens to your site!
Forget IT if you want to STAY competitive over time! To do so, you’ll need SEO and Google Analytics working together with social media, and throw in lots of case studies and blogs, and you’ll need integrated software to identify people visiting your site, and on… and on, and ON. But you say, “I have a marketing manager for all that!” To which I say, “How much free time does that person have?”
Your modern website now has so many gadgets, gizmos and moving parts that either keep your visibility/popularity high or keep your site from being hacked, that updates and maintenance have to happen weekly not annually. To adapt to these changes, we have had to transition from a company that develops great websites and hands them off to internal marketers, to a company that develops, hosts, updates, SEOs, WordPress maintains, converts leads, and sets up drip campaigns for great websites and can’t ever really fully hand them off for clients to manage. How’s that for job security? (we didn’t ask for this but we know it is what our clients need)
I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it’s certainly a big change in how we’ve been doing business and how our clients have been expecting to engage with us. In other words, we have kind of come full circle. In the early days of website development, a client would NEVER have dreamt of editing their own site, and I feel like in some ways we are getting back to that. We have clients that “can make simple updates”, but most small to medium size companies don’t have the skill-sets in house to deal with all of this, and they certainly are not going to update their plug-ins in WordPress.