While there are so many ways to connect with your audience and patrons online—email, social media, mobile applications, search engine optimization, marketing, AI platforms—your website is and will continue to be the core of your online presence. Your website is the primary source of truth where users will experience your organization and its message in its most complete form.
Too often, after a significant investment of energy and money into a large website redesign, the site is left as-is and slowly ages. With online technology constantly evolving, a website can easily become outdated without ongoing attention. That’s why continued investment in your site matters.
In addition to keeping a website secure and safe from threats with technical updates, you should also respond to the ever-changing expectations of your users from a content, functionality, and navigation perspective. Most importantly, your website needs to keep up with how your organization is evolving and how to support the needs and expectations of your audiences and patrons.
YOUR WEBSITE MATTERS
While a physical visit to your venue is your organization’s primary goal, your website is the leading way your audience will connect with you daily. When you reach out to people on social media or drop an email newsletter into their inbox, those touchpoints can and should lead back to your website. It’s also the way that a lot of people connect with you financially, by buying a ticket or making a donation. As a result, it needs to be a seamless experience with as little friction as possible.
This means that you will want to invest in making your website the best it can be and ensuring the site is up to the most modern standards. If there are pages or sections of your website that are outdated, don’t match your current branding, or don’t work well on specific browsers or devices, you are damaging your relationship with your visitors.
THE DREADED REDESIGN
When most people think of optimizing a website, they think of sweeping changes. While some people find the prospect of a complete website redesign exciting, others find it extremely daunting. Overseeing a large project on top of your regular responsibilities can be overwhelming, and if you’re not an expert in web design, it’s easy to procrastinate. If your team has a history of missed deadlines and cost overruns, you might be especially apprehensive about such a large-scale project.
While there are always unknowns in how a project will go, there are ways to skip or reduce the frequency of needing a website overhaul, and that’s by putting in place a consistent, ongoing investment to iterate on and improve your current site.
WHAT IS ITERATIVE DESIGN?
Iterative design and development is a process whereby you on a regular basis invest in making changes to the overall content, design, and technology of your website. Rather than only focus on the basic upkeep of the website—such as software upgrades and security patches—the goal is to consistently keep the content fresh and relevant, refine the design, and optimize the code.
By putting aside the time and budget to work on the site regularly, you will have the ability to respond to user requests, team suggestions, and organizational needs in real time. It will give you a chance to update imperfections, add features and functionality, and optimize the site.
Historically, most organizations outgrow their website in a 3-5 year time frame. While a redesign case can be made easily if your brand is changing, your organization has evolved, or your leadership needs a completely new way to communicate, iterative design can and will keep your current site solid in the meantime. Iterative design principles will not only extend the time frame possible beyond 5 years but also keep your current site viable until the new version is ready.
BENEFITS OF ONGOING INVESTMENT
Investing in your website on an ongoing basis will enable you to respond to your organization’s needs more quickly and efficiently. You can…
- Ensure that your site is evolving alongside user and technical expectations.
- Keep track of changes your team has requested and adjust and prioritize based on your goals.
- Experiment and compare the success of different campaigns or updates. By quantifying and measuring success, you can, with hard data, know what is affecting ticket sales or donations.
Plus, an ongoing investment will allow you to spread out your budget over time and manage your costs incrementally, which is easier than finding the money for a large, one-time investment.
YOUR “SHIP OF THESEUS”
Over time, as you invest in ongoing improvements to your website, there could come a point where you start to realize that what you are currently working on is quite different from what you initially launched. With feature enhancements, third-party integrations, content changes, and imagery updates, you may not even recognize that much of your original site.
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the Ship of Theseus, it’s a thought experiment where one asks: if you changed every element on a ship physically, is it still the same ship? The same question applies to your website—is it still the same site if you’ve changed all elements over time?
By taking a non-standard, evolutionary approach, you can effectively go through a complete website redesign over a multi-year period. After a few years, the website you initially relaunched will not only feel different but will be an even stronger platform for your organization.
SMALL CHANGES, BIG IMPACT
If you’re tired of the all-or-nothing approach, there is a different way to think about your website and make it something you actually want to work on and invest in. By seeing your team as partners in its ongoing development, you can create a collaborative process that benefits everyone and strengthens your organization. We challenge you, then, to come up with a development plan that is manageable, measurable, and iterative so your website can evolve alongside your ever-evolving audiences.
Warren Wilansky is the president and founder of PLANK. PLANK is a digital studio based in Montreal that specializes in designing responsive websites and mobile applications.