The value of longevity
Trust is hard to build. It's also an extremely valuable asset. That's why it really pays off to keep websites around, while still modernizing. Tips, tricks & lessons learned keeping sites 20+ years.
Maintaining a website requires different skills and tools than building a new one. For web developers, it's tempting to focus on the latest and greatest. However, for content editors and site maintainers, long-term usability is key. In this talk, we use one site as example, which over 25 years has moved from Dreamweaver, Joomla, Plone 3, Plone 4 and CastleCMS to now Plone 6 with Volto.
The mere fact that it has existed for so long, creates superb value: an incredibly high Google ranking, incoming links that still work - a valued resource for journalists, researchers and other key audiences.
The talk features tools Plone has to help maintain consistency, but will also show what is missing and what would exist in an ideal world. It will also feature external tools to increase your site's findability, and on practices and things to absolutely avoid.
It hopes to inspire developers to deliver sites that not only look good on delivery day, but will help their clients for years and years.
Many developers do not have the experience of maintaining a site over ten or more years. Yet what they build ends up in the hands of site administrators, who will need to do that. And their experiences matter: happy customers are return customers.
