Your website is never done
After months of hard work, your new website is live 🎉
Your job is done… right?
Not quite. Launching is just the start.
One of the best things about the web is that websites are malleable. That’s what sets the web apart from print. A printed brochure is fixed: you pull together the content, design it, send it to the printers, and that’s that. Spot a typo afterwards and you either live with it or reprint the whole thing. The web is different. Spot a typo and you can fix it in seconds. That’s something to embrace.
In What is Discovery?, I wrote: “You’re constantly learning about your users, your content, your constraints. You don’t reach a moment where you know everything and the designing begins.”
This holds true at every stage of a project, including after launch. You’ll notice what works and what doesn’t, and see how people actually use your site.
The world around your website changes too. Your organisation may launch a new service or set a goal the website needs to support. The industry shifts as well: as I write this, Google’s move towards zero-click results is reshaping how people find websites. Your website needs to keep up.
It helps to shift your team’s mindset from project to product. A project has an end date. A product is something you nurture, improving it in small, continuous steps.
Why websites need ongoing attention
A website is like a garden: it needs regular watering, weeding and pruning. Leave it alone and it soon gets out of hand.
A few things keep changing:
- Software needs maintaining. Your CMS and hosting need regular updates to stay secure.
- People’s needs change. What your audience wants from you today may not be what they need next year.
- Technology moves on. New devices, browsers and habits change how people find and use websites.
- Content goes stale. Information can quickly drift out of date.
- New opportunities appear. A new channel, feature or audience can open up at any time.
What this looks like in practice
Here are a few things to think about.
A redesign should fix foundational issues
The best redesigns aren’t only about a new look. Done well, a redesign sets your organisation up to keep improving for years.
A large part of your redesign brief should be about fixing workflow issues and helping your team make changes with confidence. That means a CMS your team can use without needing a developer, and the processes to make good content decisions (see Great websites are easy to update).
Get the foundations right and you’re on the way to a great website. Get them wrong and you'll be back here, redesigning again, far sooner than you'd like.
Keep a phase-two list
A redesign project has a fixed budget and a deadline, so not everything will make it in. Part of discovery is deciding what has to be there on day one, and what can wait.
Throughout the project, keep a running list of ideas and requests. By launch, you’ll have a backlog that can form the basis of phase two.
It also means if you have a member of the team that really wanted a particular feature that didn’t make the cut, it’s not lost and forgotten.
Budget for year two
I’m often asked how much to set aside for ongoing maintenance and updates. I recommend setting aside roughly 30% of your redesign budget for the year after launch. If a redesign costs you £50k, plan for around £15k of continued investment in year two.
This budget funds the small, continuous work that compounds over time: refinements, new pages, and fixes informed by real usage. It’s also budget that'll be used to to work through your phase-two list.
Build improvement into your routine
If you wait until you have time to make improvements, they’ll never happen. It needs to be a habit.
That means a few simple things you do regularly:
- Review your content. Check key pages are accurate and up to date.
- Collect feedback. Ask people what’s working and watch how they use your site.
- Monitor performance. Keep an eye on speed and your key metrics.
- Ship small updates often. Don’t save everything up for one big push.
These are small things, and that’s the point. Small and frequent updates beat large ones done rarely.
The best websites are never done
A well-built website can last five years or more, but only if your organisation commits to looking after it.
The best websites aren’t the ones with the biggest launch. They’re the ones that keep improving, month after month.