A Site That Would Survive Any of This

The test

Imagine search, social, and every tool discussed this year works differently in five years, in a way nobody can currently describe.

What would you want your site to be, given that.

The answer is short and unfashionable, and most of it is available to any business this month.

It is also, uncomfortably, mostly things people already know and have not done.

Own the parts that matter

• The domain, registered to you.
• The files, in your possession.
• The content, written by you.
• The customer list.
• The photographs.

The first is where businesses discover a problem at the worst moment. A domain registered by a supplier, in their name, is the single most dangerous arrangement in this list, and it is common.

Keep it plain

Since complexity is what fails over time.

A site built from ordinary pages, with modest styling and few scripts, still works in five years.

One built on a page builder, a framework, and eleven plugins requires all of those to still exist, still be maintained, and still be compatible.

Every dependency is something that can be discontinued, and over five years several of them will be.

Plain also happens to be fast, accessible, and cheap to change, which is why it keeps appearing as the answer to unrelated questions.

The test is whether somebody unfamiliar could edit a page without special software.

Put the specifics on the page

Which is the content half.

Prices, timescales, areas, what you refuse, and real examples with real figures.

All of that is useful to a reader now, and it is the material that any future arrangement still has to draw on.

Whatever assembles or presents information in five years, it will be assembling it from somewhere, and pages containing things nobody else has published are the ones worth drawing on.

A site of general descriptions is exposed under every version of the future, including the current one.

A worked example

A business had a site built in 2016 on ordinary pages with no page builder and few plugins.

It has been through two hosting moves, one design refresh, and three changes of whoever maintains it.

Nothing has broken, nothing has needed rebuilding, and the running cost has been small throughout.

A comparable business built the same year on a heavy platform has rebuilt twice, both times because something underneath was discontinued.

Neither business made a strategic decision about this and one has spent several times more than the other.

The difference was how many things the site depended on.

Make contact possible in one action

The conversion half, and it does not change with anything.

A telephone number that dials when tapped, visible without scrolling, on every page.

A form asking for as little as possible, that has been tested this month.

And a stated response time you actually meet.

No arrangement of search, social, or anything else changes the fact that somebody who wants to contact you must be able to in one action.

Sites lose more work here than anywhere, in every era.

Keep the records that outlast the site

Since the site is not the asset.

A customer list with dates and jobs, your photographs in one place, your prices and how they moved, and the reviews you have collected.

All of those survive a rebuild, a platform change, and a supplier leaving.

A business holding those can rebuild in a fortnight, and one without them starts from nothing whatever it spends.

That is the difference between a website and a web presence, and it is not a technical distinction.

Write down how it works

Since the fragile part of most small business sites is that one person knows how everything fits together.

One page listing where the domain is registered, who the host is, what the platform is, which plugins matter and why, and where the backups go.

That is the document that makes a supplier replaceable, and its absence is what turns a routine change into a project.

Add the logins to wherever the business keeps its passwords, in the business's own account rather than an individual's.

Twenty minutes now saves a fortnight at the exact moment when a fortnight is not available.

What to leave out

Since durability comes partly from omission.

Anything requiring a subscription to keep working.

Anything depending on a single platform's continued goodwill.

Anything you cannot edit without the person who built it.

And anything added because it was current, which dates fastest of all.

A site with none of those is boring and it is still there in five years, which is the entire objective.

Nothing here is about how it looks

Worth stating, since durability gets confused with dated appearance.

A site can be refreshed visually every three years without touching any of the structure underneath, and that is the cheap version of staying current.

What makes a site survive is who owns it, how many things it depends on, and what is written on the pages, none of which is visible.

So the durable choice and the modern-looking choice are not in tension, and treating them as the same decision is what produces unnecessary rebuilds.

Change the typography and the photographs when it feels tired, and leave the foundations alone.

The counter-case

Durability is not the only goal.

A shop needs a platform, a booking system needs a dependency, and refusing all of them means refusing capability the business actually needs.

Modern platforms also handle a great deal correctly that a plain site has to be given deliberately.

And a site nobody visits is durable and useless.

Own the domain and the files, keep the dependencies few, put the specifics on the page, and hold the records separately.

The checklist

1. Check who the domain is registered to.
2. Get a copy of the files.
3. Count the dependencies.
4. Put prices on the pages.
5. Test the form this month.
6. Keep the customer list separately.
7. Keep the photographs separately.

Step one takes two minutes and is the item most likely to be wrong, since a domain in a supplier's name is discovered at the exact moment the relationship ends.

The quick version of the whole check is covered in testing your own site in ten minutes.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.