Let's consider the life cycle of a house for a moment. The cycle begins with the house in the construction phase. Once the home is ready to be lived in, the cycle shifts from construction to the maintenance phase. Finally, after the home has been in use for a while it's time to modernize and upgrade old fixtures and design elements.
The life cycle of a website works in the exact same way.
[Graphic showing the three main stages: construction (initial build), maintenance (content updates, technical updates/bug fixes), upgrades (functionality/design changes)]
When comparing the two, the main difference for the life cycle of a website is that the timeline is shorter. This is mostly because new technology is always being developed and design trends change overnight. Plus, unlike making drastic changes to a house, you can tear down a website and rebuild it all without securing a single building permit!
Let's explore the three phases in more depth...
Construction Phase
- Completely new website build or significant changes to an existing site (e.g. switching to a different CMS)
- Define site purpose to help guide decisions
- Determine minimum required features to serve site purpose
Maintenance Phase
- Daily/weekly/monthly updates (e.g. security updates for CMS)
- Adding content (e.g. blog posts, articles, products)
- Only minor changes to design/functions (e.g. fix an error, update a color)
Upgrade Phase
- This phase is common, but technically optional
- Important to do a cost-benefit analysis between upgrading and doing a full re-build (back to construction phase)
- Review site purpose; if it has changed or you would like it to change, then update and note any new functionality that needs to be added to the site
Cost vs Effort
All three phases can have a balance between cost and effort. How it's balanced depends on how complicated your website is, the type of website and hosting, and your personal ability/desire to complete the tasks within each phase. Sometimes you can spend a lot on the construction phase in order to make it simpler to handle maintenance on your own and with a minimal time commitment. Or, you might set up your website on your own to save on costs, and then have someone you call upon to help with maintenance tasks when needed. The key here is that, as the site owner you get to decide.
Conclusion
As a website owner, it's important for you to have this foundational understanding so you can decide how much you want to be involved in each of the stages, and weigh the pros and cons between cost and effort. If you've ever visited a severely outdated website, you can appreciate the importance of keeping up with trends to keep visitors engaged and returning to your site.
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