Building Websites for the Long Haul: The Importance of Maintainability

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, it's easy to get caught up in creating visually stunning, trend-driven websites. However, at VHUG, we believe that a website's longevity and effectiveness hinge on an additional crucial factor often overlooked: maintainability.

Corporate communication websites serve as the digital face of a company for years, often a decade or more. This necessitates a fundamentally different approach to development compared to short-lived projects like landing pages. Unlike these temporary platforms, corporate websites require constant evolution to align with changing brand identities, technological advancements, and user expectations.

Our Focus on Maintainability

To address the complexities of long-term website management, we prioritize maintainability from the outset.

This strategic approach involves:

• Technology Agnosticism: By minimizing reliance on frameworks, we gain unparalleled flexibility to adapt to evolving web technologies without extensive overhauls. This allows for gradual updates to layout, templates, and modules, ensuring a consistently modern look and feel.
• Modular Design: Breaking down the website into self-contained components facilitates easier updates and replacements. This modular approach reduces the risk of cascading changes and minimizes development time.
• Economic Efficiency: Continuous website refinement through maintainability is significantly more cost-effective than periodic full relaunches. This approach not only saves resources but also ensures a more consistent brand presence.

In an era of rapid technological change, a maintainable website is not just a preference but a necessity. By prioritizing this aspect from the initial stages of development, we create digital platforms that stand the test of time, evolve with the brand, and deliver long-term value.

The choice of CMS is often crucial

The content management system on which the website is based plays a (logically) central role. Not only is all content managed there and maintained over time - the core system and all extensions must be kept up to date over the years and also function smoothly together in the long term.

We have had the best experience with the Contao CMS - for which we have also been a premium partner for many years. With Contao, important content management functions are part of the core system, or are further developed by the same team. News, events and forms are seamlessly integrated and provide an important basis for the editorial maintenance of the site. We would be happy to present this and many other advantages of the system in a personal meeting.

We also like to work with TYPO3 and a variety of more compact CMS for smaller projects - Wordpress, Grav and Kirby have all found a heart and a home with us.

Our Offer

We use our many years of experience in support not only for new websites and relaunch projects. We are also happy to take over existing websites, look after them in the long term and are available to help with problems, requests and (new) requirements. Still not convinced? We have many more good arguments for doing maintenance with us :)