Maintaining consistency and reliability is one of the most important parts of website design. While occasional updates and changes are unavoidable, if you are constantly changing the layout and design of your website, you will run into a number of problems. One thing that I have learned is that if you change a website’s layout too frequently,  you will cause frustration and confusion among your customers. In the internet age, your competitors are just a few keystrokes away. Anything that causes frustration or confusion will are things that decrease your likelihood of a successful sale of your products or ideas. Here are a few reasons that cause websites to be updated too frequently, as well as a few ways to avoid them.

 

Websites frequently undergo problems for one of two reasons. First: websites that have been poorly designed and are causing problems will need to undergo changes. If customers are complaining, the site is unreliable, or was not designed to handle the loads or types of uses it is experiencing, it may need to be reworked and redesigned. This could be a result in a shift in your business strategy, where you are targeting and engaging clients in different ways, but usually this is a result of poor planning in your initial design. Failure to hire a skilled engineer to design and implement your website will mean that you have to end up hiring one down the line, after you have experienced problems and possibly lost business.  Obviously websites do not have an expiration date, but as internet protocols become updated, security and hacking advancements are made, and as your customers needs and business model evolve. A dated website is simply one that no longer performs the tasks it was designed for.

 

The other reason that websites change frequently is an overzealous manager or designer. While it is critical to keep a website modern, changing layout and how it is interacted with too much is a sign that you might be overdoing things. Endlessly trying to optimize can end up with a product that is worse than any of its individual iterations. So, the key to a good experience is to hire a skilled engineer with vision who can design a page that will last. Starting with a solid well planned platform, and having faith in it will be critical to providing a consistent, predictable, reliable, and pleasant interface for your customers.