Website Maintenance

When it comes to Website Maintenance, I don’t just walk away once your website is up and running (unless you want me to).

With the speed that technology moves, a brand new website can appear old and tired after just a few years. Additionally, what is once seen as cutting edge technology will eventually no longer be supported. To keep ahead of your competitors, it is recommended that your website is periodically refreshed, both visually and technologically.

There’s a lot to do to make sure your website is up to date so I can also, for example:

Maintain your SEO – Google is always adding new features and changing its algorithms.
Add new posts
Make changes to your website
Plugin updates
Core site updates
Full site backups

Why Should I Upgrade my Website?

The main reasons to upgrade a website are to:

ensure they remain supported. Websites are rarely built from scratch anymore and so themes and templates are used. If they are no longer supported, they can’t be upgraded and lose functionality
maximise security to protect them from hacker attacks
take advantage of new features available to modern websites
take advantage of new payment gateways available to modern websites

Examples of Website Maintenance

Luton Higashi Karate Kai

2002 Version

I launched the Luton Karate website in 2002. It was written in HTML and I edited it with Dreamweaver.

This was a time before camera phone. News articles were mainly text unless someone had brought their digital camera with them.

There was no social media. No Facebook. No YouTube. Google was only just becoming a thing. Having a website, no matter what it looked like, in 2002 was a big deal.

2013 Version

I updated the website in 2013. This was still using HTML and Dreamweaver but templates were far more sophisticated.

Camera phones were common, as was social media. WordPress was gaining popularity, but this was mainly among people without HTML skills as it still had its limits.

2015 Version

By now WordPress was the gold standard of website building so I moved over to it. I made the website using a standard WordPress theme (template).

This introduced the ability to have pages (static pages) and posts (blog articles) as well as many new features.

WordPress is also very Google-friendly so it helped with rankings.

2021 Version

Although the 2015 version still looked OK, it was time to upgrade yet again. The theme I had used six years ago had fallen out of support so I moved to Astra, one of the most popular themes available. This should provide some longevity to the website.

Moving from one WordPress theme to another is fairly simple and the process only took about three days.

Daniell Cheetah Project

2013 Version

I took over the Daniell Cheetah Project website in 2010. I upgraded it to this in 2013.

It was still an HTML website but I was able to embed videos from YouTube in it. For its time, the theme was pretty good.

2014 Version

I upgraded the website to WordPress. Sliders and Hero Images entered our vocabulary. This website has an early slider where the images on the front page change, sliding from one to the other.

WordPress took a lot of programming out of the equations. Menus were easy to make and news items were easier to add.

2021 Version

But the 2014 theme fell out of support and I needed to keep up with technology. I was concerned about attacks on the website as well as its ability to keep up with php versions. In 2021, I moved to an industry-standard WordPress theme. This upgrade only took about four days

Get My Black Belt

2010 Version

I launched the Get My Black Belt website in 2010. It was written in HTML and I edited it with Dreamweaver.

I was able to embed YouTube videos into it as videos on websites were considered a novelty at the time!

The website was designed to sell Martial Arts DVDs but lacked the technology to sell online courses until . . .

2014 Version

I updated the website to WordPress. This was a whole new world for websites with slugs, widgets and plugins being introduced. I was able to find plugins to provide functionality for almost everything I needed, including a membership site on the website.

2021 Version

But time marches on and the 2014 version fell out of support from the theme suppliers so I moved to a new theme. The key lesson is to ensure you always use a popular theme.

If a theme is popular, it will attract more users and will be better supported. Just because a theme is popular, it doesn’t mean that your website will be identical to other websites with the same theme. On the contrary, popular themes are so flexible that no two look alike!

If you would like to learn more or would like a free quote, please do not hesitate to contact me!