You’d be forgiven for thinking the builders had been out to visit the Hall recently – but it’s a website renovation we’re talking about here.
As the present Hagley Hall website nears its fourth birthday, we did an objective appraisal and found several aspects of the website were due an upgrade.
The inconvenient truth is that the web is constantly changing, always upgrading, never standing still. Features that were cutting-edge only a few years ago become commonplace, or even redundant. Nowhere was this more evident than in the abundant use of Adobe Flash throughout the Hagley Hall website. Only a year ago, Flash was still in widespread use as a way to add rich interaction and attractive graphics to a website. Indeed, Flash still has its place for more complex web applications beyond the abilities of HTML and JavaScript. However, the advent of HTML5 and more prevalent use of JavaScript means we can now replace some Flash elements, improving accessibility and reducing loading times.
Websites updated as frequently as Hagley Hall’s are also subject to a different sort of problem; ‘feature creep.’ This perhaps rather sinister-sounding term is really a name for when unforeseen features are continually added to a website. Sometimes there is no planning for a new feature, be it a fresh page layout or a massive new feature like Hagley Hall’s event table planner.
Both of these ‘bedbugs’ of the Internet eventually make it advisable to take a close look at how a website is built and make upgrades both technical and structural. Reorganising content added slowly over the course of four years can have a great impact on how useable the website is.
If you have any questions about the topics in this article, or if you would like Source to take a look at your existing website’s structure, optimisation and accessibility, contact us now for a no-obligation discussion.
