Reduce, reuse and recycle

Updating a website without busting your budget and alienating your staff

I work in communications so it often feels as if everyone I meet wants a new website. There are some good reasons for this. We all spend so much time on our own sites that we get tired of them much faster than our audience, and internet innovation moves quickly, offering endless new opportunities.

If you are a new business or organisation you will need a new website along with all your other communications. However, the rest of us should think carefully before embarking on the expense and stress of a shiny new site. Sometimes it is better to step back and consider what you can salvage from the old one and what really does need to be rebuilt.

To understand the options we need to dismantle a modern website and figure out how it works. Let’s take a look under the bonnet as well as checking the paintwork and the state of the upholstery. If you have a website, knowing this stuff is going to help you manage and maintain your investment.

There are four parts to a modern website. Hosting, CMS, look and feel and content. If you are in charge of maintaining, commissioning or managing a website you probably already know about these, but let’s look at the different parts with an eye to ‘replace or reuse’.

Hosting

Your website hosting makes it accessible to viewers via the World Wide Web. Larger organisations sometimes host sites on their own servers (computers designed specifically for this purpose) but most of us use an internet hosting service. This means the files that run the site sit on a server owned by a hosting company with access to the internet through a data centre.

If your hosting provider is no longer able to meet your needs then you have some work to do. With the right technical support it is entirely possible to rebuild a website with a new host, but this is unlikely to be quick or easy. However, you can reuse all your content and reproduce the look and feel of your current site if it is still sending the right messages to your audience.

When you choose a web host you should expect this to be a long term relationship and plan accordingly. There are many things to consider, which brings us very quickly to . . .

Content Management Systems (CMS)

There are still plenty of ‘hand coded’ websites around written directly in the mark up languages web browsers read (eg HTML). However, they are getting rarer. To change this kind of site you need to read, write and upload computer code and files. Most modern websites rely on a CMS to make it easy for anyone to write articles, post events, edit web pages and add pictures, without writing code. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of CMS systems and most people in the digital industry have strong preferences. Your technical colleagues and IT suppliers will have their favourites and your hosting company will list the systems it supports. Your CMS often also controls how your website looks and how visitors navigate around the site.

When you switch CMS systems, even if you keep other aspects unchanged, your website will look and function differently. Like hosting, if you decide to switch CMS you are pretty much building a new website and you are likely to want to make other improvements at the same time.

The CMS is software installed on the servers that host your website. Ensuring that this software is properly installed, kept secure, updated and operational is a critical part of your hosting arrangements.

Currently the larger, popular CMS products are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. You may also hear many more names in any discussion of content management systems. They all have different strengths. The biggest variation is their ease of use by non-technical people. If your colleagues have learned to use your current CMS, and it is still being regularly updated and introducing new features, there is probably no reason to change.

Look and feel

This is the part of a website that everyone in your organisation and audience will talk about most. If you are using a CMS look and feel can also, thankfully, be the easiest part to change. ‘Look and feel’ includes the colours, layout, fonts, navigation, ease of use and accessibility of your website. It may also include your logos and other aspects of your visual identity and brand. It is typically put together using time-saving templates designed for your CMS. Hand coded websites can look like absolutely anything that a developer can communicate to a web browser using computer code. Very few websites need this level of innovation so most sites use templates.

A graphic or web designer will be invaluable in helping you design or improve the look and feel of your website. However, acceptable ready-made templates are available for simple sites. Your CMS, or your budget for developer time, will probably limit your choices for layouts, extra features and special gadgets.

Content

This is usually the hardest part of a website to manage and it needs constant updating. The content is the text and images that together create the messages your website sends to your audience. Large organisations typically have hundreds of pages of content hosted online and a wide set of stakeholders fighting for precious space on the busiest pages. Smaller organisations, in contrast, sometimes struggle to write and source the best content to get their message out.

Writing for the web is a special skill. So special it has its own article here. A good website includes many different points of view. It is unified by your organisation’s tone of voice and visual identity, so you will want to get your colleagues involved. The hardest part of a new website is usually tuning the messages and sourcing new text and pictures, so any material you can reuse will help. The launch of a new, or renewed, website is always a good opportunity to get everyone to review ‘their’ section of the site. However, reusing existing content can be a pragmatic approach and will avoid delays while you wait for new text and pictures to be produced, edited and approved for publication.

This article is only an overview of the different parts of a modern website. My technical colleagues will want to add a lot more detail, but breaking a site down into these four components will help you step back and look at the big picture. A website is the main shop window for most organisations and businesses. The important thing is the message you send and the channels you use to communicate with your audience. To return to the car metaphor your decision about replacing any part of a running website should be based on maintenance costs, reliability and security. Other matters can be handled with judicious work in one of the four areas outlined above.