Websites are the shopfronts for your business. They are your suit and tie for your personal branding. They are often the first impression any party would take of you.

Therefore, they’re very important.

Websites, like anything else, need to be maintained. Change in trends and technology alone is enough to render a website out of date, or worse – broken.

So what do I mean by a broken website? Here are three things.

1. Left behind in time

So your website was built in the 2000′s. Great! You were actually the forefront adopters of actually having a website, an online presence.

But you neglected it since then and it’s become the Chernobyl of the web.

Technology and trends evolve very very quickly. New versions of web standards are being released every few years. We’re at HTML 5 now and few years back, we’re still using 1.1 standards. We use a totally new way to style the website as compared to early 2000. It was tables back then but now we use div and CSS.

The tools used to make website has changed immensely as well. Dreamweaver today is miles away from what it used to be when it was still under Macromedia. Photoshop can do things that in few years ago, people would call ridiculous or impossible.

Your website is old. The most dangerous thing that can happen is phasing out of the old standards. For example, you could have designed your website on IE6, using tables and ancient style codes. It would’ve looked great back then, but today – IE6 is phasing out, tables are a thing of the past, and the ancient style codes, along with everything else in your old website, will cause the latest updated browsers, IE 9, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, to load it poorly or worse crash the content.

When your visitors cannot view the content on your site, it’s as good as dead. In other words, it’s broken.

2. Style out of date

I’ve already touched on this a bit on the first point, regarding style sheet coding being out of date. But now let’s look at the design trends that have changed drastically.

Wait did you say you have music playing when the site loads up? That’s a BIG no-no today. Surveys show that one of the most hated things on the web is background music, that plays automatically. And let’s not even mention MIDI music. It’s so ancient, few knew it ever existed.

Now let’s look at colours. Different years bring about different trends in colour. It used to be bright and flashy at the dawn of the web. Then it became dark and minimal. Then businesses adopt the web 2.0 styles of lime green, gradients and bubblegum colours. The future looks different as well, 2012 will see more feed-based websites (a bit like your facebook) – which means design has to fit information, and not the other way around. Colours and style change drastically and since it makes up the bulk of what visitor see when they come to your site – your site could look broken if the colours are really crap.

3. Bad construction from the get go

You were starting up back then and funds were limited. Web design firms were charging a bomb to create websites because in the old days, they were niche. Not a lot of people know HTML so they could squeeze their market.

Along came a high school graduate who makes websites as a hobby in his bedroom. Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t trust hobbyists, (they can be pretty good actually) but this kid – he’s done umm, ONE website in his web design career. And that one website is his hobby page. He said he’ll do it for 200 bucks. You think it’s a bargain. You get a broken website – to start with.

Add this to all the problems I’ve mentioned in points 1 and 2 and you’ll realise your website is exponentially broken, useless and ready for scrap.

What’s the lesson here?

Firstly, understand that technology and trends are always on the move and constantly changing. To keep up to date, your website has to stay on track as well. Hire a web designer as staff or the very least engage in a contract that allow you to keep your website updated.

Secondly, put your trust in an experienced designer – if the website you’re building is of high stakes. For example, you shouldn’t leave the construction of your e-commerce site, which is your store front and company image, to someone who’s still learning the basics of web design.

If you want to do a landing page for a new product however, I’m all for hiring cheaper, less experienced web designers. Main point is, get experienced designers to work on your important sites.