How your website’s maintainability can save you a packet

There’s an important new trend in web design. And it’s of utmost importance to smaller business.

That trend is “maintainability” of your web pages – particularly the all important front page.

What it refers to is the ability of the pages of your website to be altered easily – often by the business operator themselves (or their non-technical, non-creative staff) – without compromising the other important design components of presentation and usability.

The reason it’s so important to smaller business is that by getting this consideration right, they stand to save thousands of dollars on what is now the critical practise of website maintenance.

Here’s how it works and how to achieve it.

The importance of professional design

The input of professional web designers is imperative if you want your website to look appealing and distinctive – a highly advisable goal if you want to be seen as credible in the eyes of new and old customers alike.

But without proper briefing and guidance, designers can often come up with web page design that is either difficult or impossible to maintain without returning to them every single time. And that means expense.

Take this front page design for the website of pyjama king Peter Alexander for example.

Given it’s now “silly season”, pretty much the entire front page carries design elements reflecting either Christmas or its (Australian) summer product lines.

And this makes perfect sense. Not only are website visitors interested in Christmas gift ideas, but also the lighter summer styles.

Ideally all businesses would be able to present their front pages in such a seasonal, topical and professional fashion.

See too how the main product lines of kids, women’s and men’s are easily identified, while allowing some useful areas like Gift Guide, Just In and a prominent link to the online catalogue.

High creative = High expense

The problem for smaller businesses is that designs like these rely heavily on the work of professional but often costly graphic designers.

Given that this design can only withstand a short “shelf” life (ie. until Christmas), it can be seen that the designers (and perhaps developers) will have to be brought in again shortly to either re-install a more generic design or a completely new one.

In fact, there is very little on this page that can’t be altered without either of design or development skills.

While an organisation the size of Peter Alexander could easily justify such an expense, it is often outside the budgets of smaller business.

By comparison, let’s take a look at the design for Melbourne homewares retailer Radstock + Kendall.

While it’s fair to say that this design doesn’t quite “entice” as much as the Peter Alexander example, it has been designed in such a way that the non-technical and non-creative operator can keep the design topical without having to return to the graphic designer each and every time.

Professional yet maintainable

In other words, with just some initial guidance, they can change the content of the front page while maintaining a professional “look and feel”.

The areas that they can easily alter by way of their Content Management System include:

• The text area beneath the logo (Welcome to Radstock, etc).
• The text area in the large red panel.
• The central large image.
• The images within the categories of Furniture, Accessories, etc.
• The Now On Sale items (in fact these headlines are automatically generated from articles they also create).
• The opening hours.
• All menus.

Note too that none of these elements in themselves require further graphic design. They are relatively simple text or images that simply need to be inserted into the respective areas.

Massive savings over time

The ability to be able to alter these important areas without bothering your designer not only will save the operators considerable expense, but also offers the ultimate in convenience.

They can simply do it themselves whenever they need to.

But such an approach comes with a caveat. Without proper guidance and in the wrong hands, websites can soon look more like a dogs breakfast – which really defeats the entire purpose.

But with good design and guidance in website maintenance, brilliant results are quite achievable.

The savings on presenting your website and in particular your front page in this maintainable fashion would amount to thousands of dollars every year.

For those on a budget (and these days who isn’t), ensuring this maintainability of your web design provides the ideal way of keeping your website current, professional and cost-effective.

In addition to being a leading eBusiness educator to the smaller business sector, Craig Reardon is the founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which was established to address the special website and web marketing needs of SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.