It feels like a dark time in the life of a small business owner when their web developer breaks the bad news about needing to upgrade their software. Yesterday, their web site seemed just right. Suddenly, it’s a violent approaching storm requiring an infusion of money and time just to keep the walls from crashing in. It seems there is no silver lining.
Except, thankfully, there is! Upgrades that involve a lot of your developer’s time usually are taken up with recreating basic components of your site using whatever framework has been augmented by the software company. Often, this means rebuilding a template or theme, sometimes from scratch. When your developer is starting from nothing, there may be great opportunities to rethink pieces of your online presence without adding much cost to the upgrade process. If you were to make those same changes later, you might be re-doing work that happens in the upgrade process, essentially paying for some things twice. In this post, we’ll cover some of the things you might want to rethink while you’re doing a rebuild.
Look and Feel
There are several pieces to the look and feel (a.k.a. design) of your site that might be more easily altered during a software upgrade. If your developer needs to recreate the CSS — short for Cascading Style Sheets — it’s a good opportunity to revisit things like text color, font, and size; if your developer will be rebuilding your entire template/theme, you could consider major changes to the shape and layout of your site.
Functionality
Especially in open-source content management solutions, sometimes an upgrade of the core software happens ahead of the third-party extension/widget/plugin developers’ abilities to upgrade their own work. This can mean that the great image slideshow widget you use in your existing site won’t work anymore once you upgrade. This is frustrating, but it’s also a chance to pick out a new widget, one that may even add a feature you’ve always wished you had. Take the time to investigate each third-party extension you currently use — not just to see if it will work once you upgrade, but also to see if it really matches with the feature set you want on your site.
Content
When you move from one house to another, it can be a good opportunity to judge the true usefulness of the variety of odd kitchen gadgets you’ve collected. The same goes for content on your site. When you’re upgrading, you should always take some time to evaluate the usefulness — and even the accessibility — of older content. That page you created for your clearance sale in 2006? Especially if it’s been taken offline and isn’t being used as a template for other pages, there’s no reason to leave it in your database.
Similarly, you may find that you want to take the opportunity to rearrange or rename your existing content. This is a great time to make those careful considerations. Are people going to the pages you think are most important? This is a chance to change some page and menu titles, rework some writing, and give your content an overall freshening-up.
Similarly, you may find that you want to take the opportunity to rearrange or rename your existing content. This is a great time to make those careful considerations. Are people going to the pages you think are most important? This is a chance to change some page and menu titles, rework some writing, and give your content an overall freshening-up.
Hosting
Changing web site hosting companies can feel daunting, but during a site upgrade can be the best time to do it. The site running on the newest, upgraded software can run at a hidden address at the new host company while it’s in development, and the “old” site can continue to run at the “old” host until everything on the new site looks perfect. It’s a fantastic way for your developer to see a site in its live environment without disrupting the experience of your online customers and readers, and given the low cost of web hosting these days, it’s not especially expensive.
When the time comes to make the switch from old to new, it’s a simple matter of pointing the domain name to the new host server. This has worked very well for our clients in the past, and has become especially useful in the era of software that can automatically port data from one host’s installation of a content management system to another host’s installation of the upgraded version, all with the click of a mouse button.
A mandatory, major software upgrade is rarely a happy surprise, but the silver linings really are there. Use it as a chance to evaluate your online presence, and maybe you’ll find it was just the thing you needed to elevate the effectiveness of your work on the web.
Need a hand working your way through an upgrade? We’re working with several sites upgrading from Joomla 2.x to Joomla 3.x. We’d be happy to help you. Connect with us via email, Facebook, or Twitter.