One of the more frustrating website problems is also one of the easiest to ignore: the site works, but nobody really wants to touch it.
Nothing is technically broken. The pages load, the forms work, the logo hasn’t mysteriously wandered into the footer, and there isn’t a giant red warning from Google telling you that civilization as we know it is about to end. From the outside, everything looks fine.
Then someone needs to change something.
Maybe the company hired a new employee, added a service, changed its service area, decided to run a promotion, or finally noticed that a page still refers to something the business stopped doing two years ago. What should be a fairly ordinary update suddenly requires finding the person who knows how the site works, explaining the change, waiting for it to be made, checking it, discovering that something isn’t quite right, and starting another round of emails.
By the time the change goes live, assuming it does, nobody remembers why it seemed urgent in the first place.
That kind of friction is easy to dismiss because there usually isn’t a dramatic bill attached to it. A website that’s difficult to update tends to cost a business slowly, a little at a time, which is much more convenient if your goal is to not notice what it’s costing you.
Unfortunately, the bill still arrives.
I’ve never worked with a business that stayed exactly the same for very long. Services change, people come and go, new opportunities appear, markets shift, and every so often someone finally wins the argument about replacing the photograph that has been on the homepage since the first iPhone.
That’s normal.
The problem comes when the website can’t move at roughly the same speed.
We’ve dealt with sites where making what should be a simple content change requires far more effort than the change deserves. Sometimes the original developer built everything in a way that makes sense only to the original developer, which is terrific for job security and considerably less terrific for the client. Other times the site has been passed through enough hands that nobody is completely sure what will happen if they touch something.
So people stop touching it.
This rarely happens through some formal decision. Nobody walks into a meeting and announces, “From this day forward, our website shall gradually become inaccurate.” The updates just start slipping. Something that could wait until Friday waits until the following week, then until somebody has time, then until it eventually becomes part of the landscape.
Six months later, the business has changed and the website hasn’t.
That disconnect matters more than it used to.
Most people hear “outdated website” and picture an ugly design from 2006 with tiny text, beveled buttons, and perhaps a tasteful animated globe. Those certainly still exist, because the Internet keeps everything.
But a modern-looking website can be outdated too.
If the services are wrong, the staff page is wrong, the locations are incomplete, or the copy no longer reflects what the company actually does, the site is outdated whether the design won an award last Tuesday or not.
That causes problems with customers first. Someone visits the site looking for a service the company now offers, but it isn’t there. Someone else calls about a service you stopped offering because, according to the website, you’re still very much in that business. A prospect finds three different versions of your service area depending on which page they happen to land on.
None of these things inspires confidence.
It also creates problems with search. Google has to understand the business from the information available to it, and increasingly AI search platforms are trying to do the same thing. If the website describes one version of the company while the Google Business Profile, directories, social profiles, and actual business describe another, you’ve created unnecessary ambiguity.
Search engines have enough to do. We don’t need to turn the company into a riddle.
This is where I think businesses underestimate the cost.
Paying someone an hour of development time to make a small change is annoying, but at least the change gets made. What worries me more are all the things that never happen because everyone already knows updating the website is going to be a pain in the rear.
A salesperson brings back a great customer story that would make an excellent case study, but nobody publishes it. Marketing has an idea for a campaign that really needs a dedicated landing page, so they send the traffic to the homepage instead. A new service launches and gets announced on social media, but the website still doesn’t have a proper page explaining it three months later.
Individually, none of those decisions seems terribly serious. Businesses have plenty of things competing for attention, and nobody is going to declare a state of emergency because a case study is sitting in somebody’s inbox.
The problem is accumulation.
Do that for a year and you’ve missed a lot of opportunities to explain the business better, rank for more relevant searches, support your sales team, improve conversion rates, and give prospective customers more reasons to choose you.
The website hasn’t “failed” in the obvious sense. It just hasn’t done nearly as much as it could have.
In some ways that’s worse, because a completely broken website gets fixed.
I occasionally encounter the idea that SEO is something completed during the website project. Optimize the pages, write the metadata, submit everything to Google, and presumably everyone can go home.
That would certainly make SEO easier.
Unfortunately, search doesn’t work that way.
A good SEO program changes the site over time. We improve existing pages when there’s an opportunity. We add content around services that deserve more visibility. Internal links change as the site grows. Questions customers keep asking become useful articles. A business expands geographically and needs its website to explain that accurately. Search behavior changes and occasionally Google changes something just to make sure everyone is still paying attention.
All of that depends on being able to work with the website.
If every recommendation that comes out of an SEO review requires a small development project before anyone can implement it, the work gets expensive very quickly. More importantly, it gets slow.
I don’t mind paying a developer for development. That’s what developers are for. I do mind paying a developer every time somebody needs to change two paragraphs of copy.
There’s a difference.
We’re also asking websites to do something they didn’t have to do a few years ago. They’re now part of the information AI systems use to understand businesses and, in some cases, decide which businesses are worth mentioning in an answer.
There’s no secret “optimize for AI” switch hidden somewhere in WordPress. If there were, somebody would already be selling it for $199 a month.
A lot of the work is much less exciting than that. The website needs clear information about what the company does, who it serves, where it works, what its expertise is, and how the pieces of the business relate to each other. That information needs to remain reasonably current.
Which brings us right back to the original problem.
It’s difficult to keep information current when changing it requires an act of Congress.
I’m very much in favor of custom websites. We build them.
What I don’t like is when “custom” becomes shorthand for “nobody except the person who built this thing can figure it out.”
Those aren’t the same thing.
A custom site should be designed around the needs of the business, which includes what happens after it launches. If the company publishes articles regularly, that should be easy. If staff changes frequently, there should be a sensible way to manage staff. If new service pages are likely, the site should be built with that in mind.
This doesn’t mean every employee should have administrator access and the ability to experiment with the database during lunch. There are parts of a website that should absolutely be protected, because I’ve learned over the years that the phrase “I was just trying something” can be the beginning of a fairly expensive conversation.
But normal content management should feel normal.
A business shouldn’t need a computer science degree to update a staff bio.
One reason we spend so much time on discovery at Strottner Designs is that we’re not only trying to figure out what a website should look like. We need to understand how it’s going to be used.
Who will be responsible for updates? What changes often? Which services are likely to grow? Does the company publish regularly? Will marketing need landing pages? Is the site going to support an ongoing SEO program? Are there sections the client should be able to manage internally and others that we’d rather they leave alone?
Those aren’t particularly glamorous questions, but they affect whether the website is still useful two years after launch.
I’d rather build the right structure in the beginning than explain later why adding one new service has somehow turned into major surgery.
A website should give a business room to move. If every new idea is followed by someone saying, “Well, the problem is the website…,” something went wrong much earlier.
There’s a fairly easy way to tell whether this is a problem.
Think about the changes your company wanted to make to its website over the last year, not just the changes that actually got made.
That second group is usually more interesting.
Was there content that never got published? A service that still isn’t represented properly? A landing page nobody built? Information everyone knows is wrong but has learned to ignore? Has your marketing team started working around the website because working with it is too difficult?
If so, the cost isn’t simply the money you spend making updates.
It’s the business you may be losing because the updates don’t happen.
That’s a much more expensive problem.
At Strottner Designs, we build websites with the expectation that they’ll need to change, because the business behind them is going to change too. The goal isn’t simply to hand over a good-looking website on launch day. It’s to build something the company can actually use as part of its marketing, sales, SEO, and growth.
If your current website makes a simple change feel like a major project, we should probably talk.
There are enough difficult things involved in running a business.
Updating the website doesn’t need to be one of them.
There’s no single schedule that works for every business. Service information, staff, locations, promotions, and other time-sensitive content should be updated whenever the business changes. SEO content and performance should also be reviewed regularly rather than waiting for the next redesign.
SEO depends on accurate information, useful content, working pages, good internal linking, and a healthy technical foundation. A website that’s difficult to maintain tends to fall behind in all of those areas.
You should generally be able to handle routine content changes without calling a developer. More technical work should still be managed by someone who knows what they’re doing. There’s a difference between having control of your website and having permission to accidentally dismantle it.
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