Here's another one of those questions you have to ask yourself whenever major site changes are being considered: Do you want to start again from scratch, or do you want to try to make your changes fit in the existing structure?

There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches:

Starting Over

BENEFITS

• Can possibly utilize new tools, packages and technologies.
• Allows for approaching your site in a new way.

DRAWBACKS

• Usually involves a lot of time, manpower and resources to undertake.
• Requires a lot of additional planning.
• Doesn't take advantage of parts of your site that are already working.

Working With What You Got

BENEFITS

• Allows you to keep what's already working.
• Requires less time, manpower and resources.
  

DRAWBACKS

• Doesn't usually mesh well with new technologies or may make what you want to do more difficult.
• Requires you to determine where new features fit into what you have instead of being able to take a new approach.

Those are the benefits and drawbacks I can think of at this time, but I'd be curious to hear what other benefits and drawbacks you can think of. Feel free to leave a comment below.

When it comes to website development, there is a constant dilemma that goes on surrounding the question "How good is good enough?" Being as we work with such a pliable media, it's easy to get into the cycle of making things that work, and then build them up to meed demands and standards. However, at what point do we hit the point of diminishing returns?

For those unfamiliar with the law of diminishing returns, it is a economics concept that is used to determine price points for products and services. For every product or service, there is a maximal point of income where the quality of the product and the price a number of consumers are willing to pay are farthest apart.

For an example, you could sell a budget laptop for $500 at a profit of $50 per laptop, and lets say 1000 people are willing to buy it. That would give you a potential profit of $50,000. You could also sell a high-end laptop for $3,000 at a profit of $500 apiece, but then only 50 people are willing to buy it, giving you a profit of $25,000. However, in between you could sell a mid-range laptop for $1200 at a profit of $100 per laptop, with 800 people willing to buy it, giving you a profit of $80,000.

As you can see, as the quality of the product rises, the price consumers are willing to pay also rises. However, at the same time, the number of people willing to buy the product at the higher price typically decreases. Following these trends, there comes a point where producing an extremely high-quality product actually works against the seller, because the combination of profit margin and number of customers reduces total profit.

But yes, this is a post about websites and not about profit margins. As developers, we need to determine the point in which we've made a product good enough to justify the time and resources we put into it. If something requires a lot of our time, but doesn't benefit our work, should we still do it? What is the overall benefit to our end product? What is the cost if we do not do it? These are all questions we have to ask ourselves when we approach our work, since we don't want to subject ourselves to diminishing returns.

One other factor that is likely to have an impact on the longevity of your website is technology. While we usually have some level of control over design, usability and utility, technology is an outside influence that is typically beyond our control. However, we can anticipate changes in technology and adapt to them appropriately.

One example of changing technology that influences our websites longevity is the ongoing “browser wars”. Recently, all three of the major browsers (Internet Explorer(IE), Firefox and Opera) received major upgrades, most notably IE. In this upgrade to version 7, Microsoft modified their implementation of web standards and CSS, which has led to a more uniform appearance between the three browsers. However, many webmasters who had designed their sites specifically to IE6 were forced to make quick changes to keep pace.

In hopes of avoiding a situation like this, most webmasters were quick to download evaluation or Beta copies of the latest upgrades in order to see how their work appeared in advance. This allowed them to pro-actively make the adjustments to their sites in order to support both versions of the browser in order to ensure a seamless transition to the upgraded technology.

This proactive approach is the one we typically want to take with our websites. We want to work to keep pace with the current technology, and take advantage of the new features that it presents us with. In the end, we wind up with a professionally run website that should function properly with the new wave of technological advances at least until the next wave comes along. It also reflects positively upon our church and commitment, which is a great message to convey as well.

Well, that wraps up this series on site longevity…I hope you collected a few pointers or got some new ideas to take into consideration the next time you sit down to revamp your church’s website!

We've already identified design and useability as important factors in site longevity, but one of the other major areas we can look at to help increase the longevity of our sites is it's utility. Whereas useability refers to the ease of use, utility refers to what is available to use. It's also a factor that has two extremes that we need to be aware of when we put together or revamp a site.

The first extreme of utility is absence, meaning that there is nothing on the site that is useful to a visitor. While there are not many sites that fall into this category, there are some. For example, there are sites that put together sets of popular search keywords and then place tons of advertisements on the page. The idea of these pages is to deceive people to visit their pages in hopes that enough will click on the ads for them to make money. For the average visitor, these pages provide no utility at all.

In a church website example, a site that comes awfully close to absence is a page that just gives a picture of the church, a little blurb about the church, maybe a photo and paragraph about the pastor, and an address and phone number. While this kind of page does provide basic information about the church, it's overall utility to the average visitor is very low. It's likely that a visitor would not come back to the church's website because they can see that there isn't much of a chance of new information being available if they do return.

However, at the other extreme of utility is inundation, meaning that there are too many tools available for a user or community of users to make use of. Again, there are not many sites that fall into this category, but one example of a page that comes close is Netvibes. Nothing against Netvibes, since I make use of it as my browser's start page, but there are so many different modules available that many have little utility, are never found by users who may utilize them amongs all the features available, or they quickly become outdated as the Netvibes infrastructure gets upgraded.

Applying this to church websites, an inundation of utility may be as simple as adding forums to a church website. Now, in many cases, the addition of forums may be a great opportunity for communication and outreach, but in the case of a small church (around 30-50 members, and let's assume only 50-60% use the internet regularly) forums are likely to be vastly underutilized as there are just not the numbers of users available to maintain a healthy set of forums.

The overall lesson is that utilization is a balancing act. We want to avoid having a site that is devoid of useable features, while at the same time avoid providing too many features that go to waste. If we can find that midpoint that best fits our church website and situation, then we only have to worry about redoing the site as the church situation changes (growth, decline, technology usage, etc.), and that will help to increase our site's longevity.

While site design does play an role in the longevity of a site, it is often not the determining factor. However, one of the key factors is often a site's usability, or the ease in which a user can use your site. The simple reason for this is that people are lazy. While that may seem like a derogatory statement, the underlying truth is that people want to do things as simply and easily as possible.

For example, let's take a look at a site like Digg. In the past, when you found an interesting site, you'd have to e-mail or IM the link to your friends and explain to them why you thought it was worth the visit/read. Now, you can simply click on a "Digg This" button and have it added to your profile, so anyone who knows about your profile can see what you're recommending. In the past, it could also be difficult to find up-to-date information on the internet that was interesting. You'd have to sift through Google results or rely on the main media websites like CNN or ESPN. Today, you can just hit up the main Digg page that lists all of the "hot" stories in the Diggscape. In essence, Digg has created a very active site and dedicated user base thanks to it's ability to make sharing preferences easier.

Now, you're probably not planning on making your church's website into the next Digg, but there is a clear lesson to be learned here: People tend not to use things that are unclear or difficult. So when we look at our sites, we want to make sure it is easily usable for the average user. Are navigation menus clearly organized? Is key information in a logical place? Do the features you may have added to the site, such as maps, Flash animations and podcasts, make the site easier to use, or are they too complicated to be useful for the average visitor? If you have dynamic content, is it easy enough for the church staff to use? Make sure to take your audience into consideration here as well, as the usability for a site may be different for a group of teenagers than it is for a group of 40-somethings.

If we take these usability factors into consideration when we put our church websites together, then it is less likely that we will have to do major reworkings on the site in the near future, thus lengthening the site's redesign cycle.