---
title: Websites Benefit from Continual Development
date: 2019-01-14T06:00:00-05:00
author: Sean Smith
canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-4/websites-benefit-from-continual-development/"
section: Podcast
---
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Guest Andrew Armitage
Andrew started his agency, A Digital back in 2008 from a spare room and employs a team of 5 people.
[ ](https://twitter.com/adigital_uk)[ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewarmitage/)[ ](https://www.facebook.com/adigitaluk)
Season 01 Episode 4 – Jan 14, 2019
44:12 [Show Notes](#show-notes)
## Websites Benefit from Continual Development
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In this episode Andrew and I talk about why websites need to be continually developed and maintained contrary to expectations of one and done.
### Show Notes
A lot of businesses tend to ignore the maintenance on their website and look at it like it's a one and done project. The expectation that a website will work without maintenance is unrealistic. Maintenance doesn't always have a tangible benefit that you can see. The benefits however include not dealing with downtime, bugs, or the site not working like it did when it first launched.
Technology doesn't last forever, this is common in all industries. Support for older operating systems on computers or phones is no longer available. CMSs also get retired, for Example ExpressionEngine 3 retired in December 2018 and Craft CMS 2 will retire in March 31 2019.
Older un-maintained sites may reach a point where it's not possible to upgrade. The only options are to rebuild completely or do band-aid fixes to keep the site limping along temporarily. By being proactive and maintaining a site regularly these sorts of things should not happen.
Continual development is adding in new features or options that were not available at the time the site launched.
### Show Links
- [The Dangers of Over Reliance on Plugins in Website Builds](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/the-dangers-of-over-reliance-on-plugins-in-website-builds/)
- [A Website is Like Owning a Car](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/a-website-is-like-owning-a-car/)
- [Hotjar](https://www.hotjar.com/)
- [Full Story](https://www.fullstory.com/)
Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology.
**\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, my name is Sean Smith. I'm with the website 101 podcast where we demystify websites for small business owners. Today I'm joined by Andrew Armitage of the UK. Andrew, could you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your company and what you do?
**\[00:19\]** **Andrew:** Sure, hi Sean, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. So I run a small digital agency over here in the UK. We're a team of six people and we technically we're full service but I don't like the term full service because I don't truly think anybody can be full service. But we have designers, developers and marketing people here on our team and we're typically working with small to medium and one or two larger size businesses. So largely content management type websites, a bit of e-commerce and some social media paid search in the digital marketing world.
**\[00:59\]** **Sean:** So it sounds like you're all over the place. It sounds almost full service and I understand what you mean about full service. It's hard for anybody to truly be full service. Less the agency is huge, like 40, 50 or more people. How can you provide all aspects?
**\[01:17\]** **Andrew:** Absolutely, and I'm always sort of hesitant to say we're full service. We've never touched branding for example. We wouldn't design a logo. We would work with brand guidelines to interpret those to create a website for example. But I do think when you're working largely with smaller businesses, I think it's really important to know what your limitations are. So in other words, when the time is appropriate to get someone who's a specialist but also be able to offer a broad range of support because that's what small businesses want. They can't afford to get a own digital marketing team necessarily. And inevitably the question will come at some time. Oh, we're just looking at this. Can you help us? So I think it's nice to be in a position to be able to say yes, but like I say to know what your limitation is and when it's the more appropriate to actually say, you know, that's a little bit beyond does. That takes us a little out of our comfort zone. However, I do know someone who could be a little bit more specialist in this area.
**\[02:19\]** **Sean:** That's exactly what I was going to say is I'm always willing to make a referral or even subcontract somebody on a job so that I can provide that service without them having to go elsewhere. But I do give them the option. Do you want to find someone or should I pull them in myself?
**\[02:34\]** **Andrew:** Yeah, absolutely.
**\[02:36\]** **Sean:** And in some cases it's something that I'm not comfortable pulling in someone on my own because I might not know anybody in my direct network that I would be willing to trust or you know,
**\[02:47\]** **Andrew:** provide a referral for. Awesome. So glad it's not just me. It goes through this.
**\[02:59\]** **Sean:** My mind's all all of us today. So Andrew, we have I have a number of questions prepared for us to talk about. And the topic that you chose for us to discuss is why benefits, why websites benefit from continual development and somewhat related to this is a lot of small businesses or even businesses in general tend to ignore the maintenance or continual development on their website. Kind of look at it like a it's a one and done project. I put X number dollars in. I want my website to work for five years. Yeah, it's a cycle of a website. Five years is like it's like 90 years in human.
**\[03:43\]** **Andrew:** Yeah, it's it's nearly a lifetime, isn't it? And yeah, it's something that we see quite a lot and hence why I thought it'd be a good conversation to have. But unfortunately with maintenance, it's it's always a cost that comes in after a project. It's a task that you know very often doesn't really have a tangible benefit. You can't necessarily see the results of maintenance. However, if you do it right, what you can benefit from is not having to to put up with things like downtime or bugs or mistakes or things that don't work as they did when you when you know that you can't get it to put up with things like downtime or bugs or mistakes or things that don't work as they did when you when the site was first launched. So it is really an important part of of maintaining a website and obviously you know sometimes a website project can take sort of three to six months. It depends on the scale of the site, of course.
**\[04:38\]** **Sean:** Working on a project that I've been working on since May and it's now the end of November. Right. It's a single web, it's a network of radio stations. Okay. It's a it's a huge much. Right. It's taking forever. We're close to launch, close. Sure. We're not quite there yet.
**\[04:55\]** **Andrew:** Yeah. But I think you know in that kind of example, the circumstances within the business within your clients business, there's a fair chance at least one thing will have changed between starting the website and when it goes live. And quite often, you know, before the before a website in goes live, there could be changes that come into play. So you like to say it's something that inevitably post launch, it's going to come up and of course technology doesn't live forever. You know, we we hear from the likes of Microsoft when they say that you know they're going to withdraw support for Windows XP. You know, it happens across the board across you know the technology. So it has to happen with the website as well.
**\[05:39\]** **Sean:** You can't get updates for your your iPhone 4 anymore or older Samsung models. Everything gets retired eventually, including CMS's next month. Expression engine 3 is retired. Yeah. You no longer providing support for it anymore. And in March next year, Crafts CMS 2 is going to be retired as well.
**\[06:02\]** **Andrew:** So it's a thing across technology. It is. And I think what's really important is to have these conversations sooner rather than later. You know, no one wants to get to March to then be told, oh, your CMS is going to be no longer supported from tomorrow. You know, because you know, in some organizations, there might be several layers of management that need to sign off budget or to approve the work that needs to be done. And and it's you know, you don't really want to be doing it after the fact. You know, it's not that the website is necessarily going to suddenly become hacked or become vulnerable in that time. But if you're going to portray that sort of professional image, it's all about, you know, telling these telling these telling people that these requirements are sooner rather than later.
**\[06:52\]** **Sean:** You know, nobody wants to hear these things. That's absolutely right. And you know, even telling people about these requirements, there's still a lot of organizations are hesitant to spend more money. The site is working now. Well, the reason that I see to maintain it is it's preventative maintenance. Absolutely. To prevent things from breaking down. What happens if your organization's website stops working because something that your host changed and they didn't know that you were running this really old version of PHP or whatever else is powering your website. And you can't fix it. And now you've got downtime for one to five or longer days as you try and migrate to a host, which will be difficult because you're running on really old stuff. Yeah. I think, you know, this is where regular maintenance. One thing that you said at the beginning of your last little bit was people are hesitant because they don't see the tangible benefits. How do you feel we can better help small businesses understand the tangible benefits of regular maintenance and updates?
**\[08:06\]** **Andrew:** Well, you know, it's, you don't have to look far in the news these days to learn of, you know, ANO, the corporation that has been hacked or has had a data breach. So, you know, that is just one reason you just imagine if you are in that kind of situation yourself and you know, we're a small business. Let's say we've got a 150 client records. Now, if we if we lost 150 client records because we'd fail to keep one of our systems up to date, not only could we be in trouble with authorities, but just imagine having to crawl with your tail between your legs to say, you know, I'm really sorry, this information has got out into the public space. So, you know, with more and more people selling online, more and more people collecting email addresses and having things like social logins and all the rest of it through their website, being able to maintain that level of security is absolutely critical. Not only from a legal perspective and from doing the right thing, but also from a brand perspective, if you're seen to be not looking after your information or maintaining your your your technology. Then, you know, that brings into question, well, do I really want to work with these this company? Do I really want to hand my information across?
**\[09:25\]** **Sean:** It's a definite impact on your reputation.
**\[09:28\]** **Andrew:** Absolutely. It's massive, massive.
**\[09:31\]** **Sean:** What about smaller organizations like, you know, like just a home renovator. He's got two or three employees or some guy running a flower shop down the street. They're not a big organization and their website's more of a brochure. Sure. They're not selling online. They've got a few pages about us location. They might update or have a blog. What is the benefit to keeping it updated or how can we demonstrate that the regular maintenance is an important thing?
**\[10:06\]** **Andrew:** Yeah. I mean, we talk about maintenance and maintenance is important, of course, because that that is the proactive stuff that's preventing things from going wrong. But I think what's really important is also an element of continual development. I was going to say that. You're right. Okay. So I jumped a gun. No, no, no, no. It's natural for all the conversation. But I think, you know, maintenance and continual development can be very much, you know, woven in together. Maintenance is sure. Yeah, looking after things and making sure that let's say there's been an update to the hardware or the software on the server. Let's say a PHP version has changed, for example. And, you know, you want to keep pace irrespective of the size of the website. If you leave a period of time of, let's say, two years between making an update, that update is going to have far more steps and risk involved to getting from A to B. Then it is, if you're, sorry, rather, if you're trying to get from, let's say, A to D, you've got steps B and C in the middle. But if you can go to A to B to C to D over a period of time, those updates are much more incremental, they're much smaller, much more efficient to actually run as well.
**\[11:26\]** **Sean:** Oh, absolutely. I've got a lot of experience with what I call rescue clients. Yeah. So a rescue client for listeners who may not know is somebody who comes to me or anybody with an existing site that was built by a previous developer. For whatever reason, they're no longer working with this developer. They've got, they fired the developer. They went out of business. They're business interests separated and they're no longer fit. Whatever, it doesn't matter. They're no longer working with them. So I take on the rescue site and it's older. It's running a very old already retired version or it hasn't been updated so that now it's much more difficult. And I actually have two or three clients that I am unable to update. What we have to do now is rebuild from the ground up.
**\[12:19\]** **Andrew:** Yep. And all of a sudden you've got a much bigger project.
**\[12:22\]** **Sean:** It is a much bigger project and considering that it's that old, it probably also needs a cosmetic refresh as well. But they don't really have the option to do much else other than band-aid fixes to get the site moving along. It's that and then plan and get an upgrade done. And I think it's not everybody's willing to do it. No. I feel it's a real disservice to not keep hammering home that you need to do this. Absolutely. And some clients might think that I'm trying to upsell them too hard. Yeah. And I think I don't. I don't know.
**\[13:02\]** **Andrew:** Why does cost them money? Absolutely. But again, it's about not being on the back foot with something when all of a sudden something has to be done within, let's say, a few days because something's gone wrong. And of course, the impact of that will vary. It's going to be different if you are that flower shop down the road compared to any commerce site selling hundreds of dollars of transactions a day. But no one wants to feel like, oh, this has to be done now. This is causing me a problem. People don't like problems. So if you can plan ahead and take that proactive and preventative approach, then hopefully those problems don't even exist. They don't even come into the situation.
**\[13:43\]** **Sean:** Exactly. And one of the things I try to do with clients that I build from a brand new site for rather than a rescue client is set up some sort of maintenance plan. Whether it's quarterly or monthly or even just annually, we'll go through. Maybe it might involve a site audit or just plain updating the CMS and any other add-ons. And this ensures that they're up to date at least once a quarter or once a year. And they're less likely to run into these issues where their site is severely impacted and unable to update.
**\[14:19\]** **Andrew:** Yeah. And I think if you know between us, Sean, we've worked together. We both have worked with the expression engine and craft. Both of those content management systems have plugins. And of course they're common across other content management systems as well. And one of the great problems with plugins. There's a wordpress.
**\[14:38\]** **Sean:** There's a word plugin for that.
**\[14:40\]** **Andrew:** Right, exactly. That should be their tagline. There's a plugin for that.
**\[14:43\]** **Sean:** Wordpress.
**\[14:44\]** **Andrew:** And there's plugins for everything. But of course, plugins were usually built to scratch someone's specific itch that might not apply to lots of individual circumstances. It applied perhaps to one person circumstances at the time. And they all move along at different paces. And sometimes that plugin might be abandoned. Others, you know, certainly I think are experienced with with a lot of the plugins will have been, you know, a positive experience. And there's been new releases and so on. But you know, as we've seen increasingly those plugins have to have some sort of ongoing charge. And I think you're in. Absolutely. And in many cases, clients who have bought websites have seen how things are released on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. You buy an app at 59p or 99 dollars or whatever it might be. And you are continually benefiting from those updates. But in reality, I mean, that's not sustainable for small businesses. And I can't see how it's actually sustainable for a lot of those app producers either.
**\[15:53\]** **Sean:** Well, I also have a lot of experience with some of my older builds. Plugins got abandoned. And not just free plugins, some of the commercial plugins. So the more plugins that you use on a website, the more at risk your website is. And I have an article on my blog over Reliance of Plugins, which I'll link to in the show notes, explaining this. And that is targeting more about other developers. But I think end users or owners of website should be aware of how many plugins they're using. Sometimes it's absolutely necessary because that functionality is not possible to create out of the box. And other times people do it because they don't know how to do it out of the box. And make sure the whole documentation there may be a little bit of an inexperienced developer. I mean, everybody has to start somewhere. That's not a job.
**\[16:48\]** **Andrew:** No, and it's just the way it is. I used to be a new developer. Yeah, absolutely. And don't get me wrong. Plugins are not a bad thing. I'm sorry, but not.
**\[16:58\]** **Sean:** On the other side, I make a case for when they are good and when you should avoid them.
**\[17:03\]** **Andrew:** There's no reason to not use plugins, but there is every reason to be cautious about how many plugins you use and what you use them for.
**\[17:12\]** **Sean:** So, and plugins need to be updated in sync with your absolutely with your CMS. And one of the reasons you want to be cautious with plugins for listeners here is if your plugin is not updated, you may not be able to update your CMS any longer. So if that add-on developer is too busy to maintain it or goes out of business or for whatever reason is no longer taking care of it, your website might be stuck at a certain version that you can no longer update until you rebuild it. And that is what I was more referring to earlier when I said I have clients that are unable to update their website. They're on older plugins that just there's nothing I can do about it.
**\[17:54\]** **Andrew:** And that's a very difficult conversation to have then to explain that we can't update you to the next version because of plugin X. And it sort of leads them then to question what they bought in the first place. They question the validity of plugins as a whole and even as far as doubting the content management system. But it can damage your relationship.
**\[18:24\]** **Sean:** It has happened to me both with websites that I built, older ones that I was not as diligent as I should have been about pursuing updates with the client. And with rescue sites where I just inherit something that is already out of date, which is not much I can do about it. Clients don't want to hear these things. That's right. And it costs you a whole lot of money. They're not really, they're not ready for that. It's unexpected.
**\[18:52\]** **Andrew:** And with the rescue site situation, that makes it even worse I think because the relationship to a certain degree is already broken down. They're already sort of up against it by they realize they've got this problem. But it's come as a surprise and now they've got to do something about it. And the sort of the trust has fallen into question with perhaps the original developer if they're still around. So it's a really important thing I think that needs to be explained at the outset of a project. What plugins are going to be used? What the cost is upfront? What the renewal cost? If there is a renewal cost? And who's responsible for it? I think it's really important that if we're building a website and we're putting two or three plugins in it, that the client knows that we are not necessarily responsible for those plugins. We will take responsibility for using them. But actually if there is a if there's a bug in one of those plugins or it doesn't work in quite the way that they might want it to in, let's say three months time, because they want to add some new functionality, we might not be able to directly do something about it. We might be able to influence it. If we have a relationship with the plugin developer or we can raise an issue or a feature request. But ultimately they need to know that it's not our full responsibility to take accountability for.
**\[20:12\]** **Sean:** Exactly. So we've spent a lot of time talking about maintenance. One of the things that I like to compare a website to is building a car or a car. I have a whole article on my blog about that, which I'll link to as well. So my question, last question before we go on to continual development more directly is, what does regular maintenance and tail we've covered some of that? Is it similar to getting an oil change or rotating the tires on my car or something else?
**\[20:47\]** **Andrew:** Yeah, I'd say so. There's lots of great analogies that we've used with websites, cars and houses, being another. But yeah, you drive a car and the tires are going to wear, the brakes are going to need replacing at some point. The wear and tear on a website is a little bit different. You don't sort of have bits dropping off usually. The main problem with website maintenance is once your website is built, it is thrown into an environment that is constantly changing. And it's things that change around your website that have the greatest impact, not the fact that your website is breaking. Unfortunately, with the best will in the world, we can't predict the future. We can't see at what point of particular technology is either going to go out of favor or it's going to have a particular security vulnerability that means something has to be done with it. So it's a little bit of guesswork as to what we think might come down the track. But I think the really important thing is it's what changes in the website environment that has the greatest impact, not what's happening on the website itself.
**\[21:56\]** **Sean:** What kind of things might change in the website environment?
**\[22:01\]** **Andrew:** So for example, I touched earlier on, let's say a PHP version. So PHP being one of the server side languages that will run on the server and it kind of does the heavy lifting behind the scenes. And that is where the transactions happen, it's where things like rendering the page will happen within your content management system. It gathers all the bits and pieces out of the database to display them to the person who's requested it through a browser. And inevitably there are new releases. So we went from PHP 5.4, then to tip commonly, I went to 5.6. And then when we're at to PHP, I forget exactly which version, I think, well, we got 7.1, I think, is the current stable release. I think it might be 7.2.
**\[22:52\]** **Sean:** I think 7.3 is like the cutting edge.
**\[22:58\]** **Andrew:** And as we've seen with Microsoft on PCs, after a certain period of time, they will say, well, we can't support this anymore because we've made so many changes to our product that are either security advances, performance improvements or ways that have changed the way code is written. You just can't merge the two together. Exactly. You're going to be introducing, you're going to get some breaking changes. So things that will work in 7, that won't work in 5.6, things that worked in 5.6 that will no longer work in 7, for example. So that means that if you're going to maintain the security of your server, you want to keep that PHP version up to date. But if you can't move your PHP version because your site's going to break, then obviously that's going to cause you a problem. And eventually you're going to run out of options for hosting that site unless you do something to change that PHP version.
**\[23:54\]** **Sean:** Exactly. And so just to bring it back to the kind of the car analogy, it would be like driving a 10-year-old car, or a 12-year-old car, and expecting it to have all of the features of a car that you bought this year. And the article where I compare it to cars, I actually talk about I bought a new car last year, but last year when I wrote the article. I got heated seats now. There was no heated seats in my old 10-year-old car. I got Bluetooth right on my dashboard for phone calls and connecting audio. I didn't have that before. But that's such a really... I've got better gas mileage. All of these things that you get by updating your technology.
**\[24:41\]** **Andrew:** Absolutely. But let's go back to that Bluetooth feature that you were talking about. That Bluetooth feature will work with the handsets that were released at the time. But at some point there's going to be a new handset, and this might be Apple because they have a habit of breaking things with taking away headphones sockets and things like that. But at some point... You need USB. Exactly. At some point you are going to get a new handset that won't necessarily work with that car, or with the software that is running on that car. So you take it down to the dealer and say, look, I've got this new handset. I can't get it hooked up and they'll say, oh, we've got a software update that's available. We're going to have to apply that. And it's exactly the same sort of scenario that we have with websites.
**\[25:25\]** **Sean:** Exactly. Okay, so let's pivot here over to continual development. So we've talked a lot about maintenance, which is really strongly related. But continual development to me feels like it's new features, updating some of your code. It could be reconfiguring code to match newer modern standards, things like that. What are your thoughts on that?
**\[25:51\]** **Andrew:** Absolutely. We talked earlier about how in the duration of a website project, how things can change. You might start a project in May and by October, the company that you're working for has decided to introduce a CRM system that they didn't have at the time you started a project. And it might be that they want to track all their website inquiries directly through that CRM system. So this could even happen after that. Absolutely. You pulled on a new feature. So it's very much about working and enabling that website to shift with the business and the requirements of the business and what people want to use it for. There could be a new marketing campaign that needs a landing page that might be a new podcast release. And they might need to add a list of the podcast episodes and the show notes and everything that goes with it.
**\[26:48\]** **Sean:** So when I launch my podcast in the new year, that's what's going to happen.
**\[26:55\]** **Andrew:** So yeah, and I think you look at a shot window, particularly for e-commerce clients, I think this is really important. But you look in a shot window. You don't see that shot window the same for sort of six or eight weeks on end. So you're constantly changing. You'll have people go and merchandise it every two or three weeks because they want people to come into that shop and they want it to look interesting. So with e-commerce, there is almost, well, there is a constant need to be re-merchandizing the shop. Not necessarily changing product pages from top to bottom. But just thinking about the way products are presented, thinking about the stories that might be associated with those products that can make that buying journey for company. So there's always a need for that kind of ongoing merchandising and continual development in e-commerce. And like I say, for other businesses where you're not necessarily a transactional website, there could be other things that business wants to do with the website. Presumably, they asked you for a website in the first place because they want to get some sort of return on their investment. Exactly. If their requirements change over time, then to continue getting that return on investment inevitably, there's going to have to be some sort of changes or updates made on the website.
**\[28:15\]** **Sean:** What sort of changes would a smaller business such as the flower shop or what was the other example I used earlier? I can't remember now, was it bakery? I don't know. I can't say far without a bakery. What kind of continual development can we see as being beneficial on more of a brochure style, like well, not a lot of content changes?
**\[28:41\]** **Andrew:** So it could be something whereby there's a new product that might need a new page to allow suitable images to be added to that page. It might be a new service. There might be a new inquiry form that somebody wants to capture interested in that particular service or if they are wanting to perhaps they notice through their inquiry form. They get a lot of people asking a particular question. So one way to address that might be to revisit how that inquiry form is set up. And actually perhaps include the question as one of the form fields. Because if that makes it much easier for them to respond to the inquiry, then surely that's a good thing to make sure that everyone who's filling that form in is giving them sufficient information to avoid them having to perhaps pick up the phone or return an email. So we didn't quite understand this bit. Can you elaborate or can you just explain what you meant?
**\[29:38\]** **Sean:** So not necessarily like new features, but things that could be improvements to user experience, something that you have discovered through this continual questioning or maybe via a B testing or you discovered that your landing pages are not quite getting as much hits as you would like or conversion. So well now we need to adjust how they're built. And that's another development phase. We're not changing, we're adding in whole new sections, but we're modifying the way the copy looks or the actual copy itself or the flow of the page.
**\[30:16\]** **Andrew:** Yeah, absolutely. And you know with with the new website, we can use all the insight that we have available the experience that the business owner might share with us and put all of that information into building a new site. But there's no substitute for actually getting that first hand feedback from people who are using the site at the end of the day. And while we can make all these assumptions, they have to be calculated assumptions at all. But there's no guarantee that we get that right first time when we launch a site. Much as we'd like to think that we're all perfect. You know, inevitably there is somebody who's going to find an edge case or a slightly more unusual situation. And that's going to need some sort of addressing. So there's loads of tools around now. Hotjar is one, for example, that we use quite a lot on some of our sites that actually give us the opportunity to watch how people are interacting with the site.
**\[31:16\]** **Sean:** I've used Hotjar. Can you elaborate a little bit more about what it gives people? And is Hotjar something that maybe I do it yourself business guy could implement into their own website?
**\[31:29\]** **Andrew:** Well, it could be something that they implement. Usually they're probably going to find they're going to want their developer to put some code in. So you can sign up for a free account with Hotjar. That requires a little snippet of code. It's about five lines that this needs to be dropped into your website. That in itself is just a copy and paste exercise, but invariably clients might not have access to their file system on the website. So it's probably best that a developer would do that for you, but it's literally a two minute job. And you certainly shouldn't cost the earth if you're billed for it.
**\[32:08\]** **Sean:** But once I would think it would be pretty easy. I'm just wondering about people using like a content builder like Wix or Squarespace. Do you know if that you it's easy to put in these kind of software?
**\[32:21\]** **Andrew:** I would imagine so. I've not had a lot of experience with Wix myself. Certainly, they will they will take it's like a Google Analytics snippet, but it might be that they just ask you for the for the unique code rather than the full. Rather than the full block of the unique numeric code rather than the full block of of HTML code. So I don't know to be perfectly honest if it would work on something like Wix.
**\[32:49\]** **Sean:** That's a fair answer. Let's go back to the hotjar and what you get out of it.
**\[32:53\]** **Andrew:** Yeah. So hotjar's got a number of tools that are built in. One of which is a screen heat mapping tool. So it will show you a color coded scale of where people are deemed to be looking. And hotjar hasn't got any sort of magic eye tracker, but it will follow where people are looking as you scroll up down the page. And whereabouts people are interacting with their mouse, for example, or fingers if it's a touch device. So it will produce a heat map. It's also got a quite a handy sort of quick poll tool. So you can pop up a quick poll to say, you know, how would you like our website? If you've got any feedback, or we just updated X, you know, is this is is an improvement for you. And then probably the number one feature is is the screen recordings. And within the free plan, you can get up to 100 screen recordings. And it will actually show you what people are doing on the site. You know, it's not through the webcam or anything, but it follows their mouse or where they tap on various links and so on on different devices. For those who are worried about security, it masks any passwords or data inputs. So if you're filling in an inquiry form, it's not possible to see the full details that that has been submitted through any forms.
**\[34:13\]** **Sean:** That is that is good to know. Yeah. I really like the screen recordings on hot jar. It's it's so enlightening about what you can see how people use your site. And well, look, my call to action, they're completely ignoring it. Or it's you can see how they're tracking to it. And it works. Yeah. Well, this gives you insight on how to improve.
**\[34:36\]** **Andrew:** That's right. And you know what, although you get a hundred free recordings, you can probably sit and just watch about 10 recordings and very quickly see things that that you might not have realized. And it might be that you've got an email and use letter sign up form, which is positioned fairly closely to another form. And this is an example that we saw once. And people were getting mixed up with which to admit button to press. And when you look at it, you think, oh, well, it's quite clearly two separate forms. But actually everybody's got a different level of ability when it comes to using websites. There's different audiences.
**\[35:15\]** **Sean:** So the key with that is for us as developers, we know the web. And it's obvious to us because we build these things. And yeah, this is that. That is that. But what about, you know, people who are less technically savvy. Or have accessibility issues like poor vision, they might have troubles. And this also goes for the website owners themselves. You're familiar, deeply familiar with your own website. It's obvious to you.
**\[35:48\]** **Andrew:** Well, you say that sometimes, yeah, sometimes I don't know that it is obvious to the website owners. And you know, another thing that we come across quite often is particularly those with ecommerce sites. You know, they don't check out through their sites. They don't go through that customer buying experience. And it's the most critical part of the site. If you're selling products online, you know, you're expecting your customers to go through it. But we find that hardly any people will will every now and again just go back in and think, oh, you know, I'll just I'll just check that process and see that it's working. And quite often the, you know, there'll be a phone call and emails says, oh, we've not seen a transaction for two or three days. Can you just check that everything's okay. So it always recommend that, you know, if you've got any commerce site, you do from time to time go and check out yourself. I know it can be a little bit of a pain because you, you know, you've got to go through the motions and then you've got to provide a refund back to your card or whatever it might be. But it's massively helpful just to reassure you that that everything is working as it should be. And, you know, there's no sort of form that perhaps has broken or there's no questions that aren't really relevant as part of that checkout process.
**\[36:59\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I would say the same thing goes even with smaller brochures sites. Check your contact form. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You need to check your contact form. About a year and a half ago, my contact work form was broken and I wasn't I wasn't getting messages and I checked it and I learned my lesson.
**\[37:21\]** **Andrew:** It might not even be your website. Your website form might work perfectly well. But let's say your spam filters changed with your email provider. It might be that the email is getting blocked at the spam filter level. So, you know, it's not necessarily something to do with the website with with all of these digital tools. There's lots of moving parts between them. So it's really important to check different places.
**\[37:44\]** **Sean:** Well, in my case, I upgraded an add-on and I didn't check the doc and there was something I needed to change. Right.
**\[37:54\]** **Andrew:** There was my own fault. So, and it hurt. Yeah. Yeah. And we've all been there. Yeah. We've all been there, which just goes to show the importance of testing it after the fact. It's all well and good doing the maintenance and sort of been sort of relaxed that we've got some preventative maintenance going on. But it's really important test and test again to make sure that everything really is working.
**\[38:17\]** **Sean:** Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you have any other thoughts about continue a development? How we can benefit from it or how we should plan or implement it? What is, when should it be a continual development rather than maybe a whole website we build? Yeah.
**\[38:35\]** **Andrew:** Websites should in theory last quite a long time. But unfortunately, because need change and technology changes, there's always a pressure to do a rebuild. But actually, if you take advantage of preventative maintenance and be proactive, you can work the site in much smaller chunks. It's like owning a home. Yeah. We've already had the car analogy. But you can't suddenly redecorate your whole house overnight because you think, well, do you know what? I'm not quite happy with how it's looking. It's something that you have to work around. That's one room at a time. And it might take you six months. There's a cost element in terms of getting the paint or new furnishings or what have you. So if you take the approach of working on different elements of the site by bit, and I think it's really important to try and prioritize which of those are the most important bits to start on, then you're going to find it much easier, not only maintenance-wise because things will be kept more at date. But there's much less likelihood that in three years time you're going to be staring at this huge task that really only option is to go through a complete rebuild. That's not something that we can do with houses. So the last thing you really want to do is find yourself at that junction with a website where it's potentially a lot more cost, a lot of time in terms of generating content and obviously working through the design and the build stages.
**\[40:09\]** **Sean:** Wow, Andrew, this has been awesome. Excellent. Lots of good information for listeners. Thank you so much for coming out. Did you have any final thoughts or links that you would like to share?
**\[40:22\]** **Andrew:** I can't think of any specific links. Obviously there's your blog post that you've mentioned. And we've talked about Hotjar. There's other tools as well. There's another one which works a little bit more advanced to Hotjar called Full Story. But that is much more of a developer's tool because that goes one step further than Hotjar where it actually will show errors on the page. Not just what people are doing on the page, but it'll show if there's errors that have been triggered by what somebody's actually done on the page. I was not aware of Full Story. I will definitely add that into the show notes and check it out. It's worth a look. But if you've got any JavaScript errors that get triggered as somebody's working the way through your site, then it will show those up. And you can do some quite powerful filtering down by looking at certain pages and even just different buttons that are on a page. Full Story is another example of a screen recording tool. But I definitely recommend at least some form of maintenance. It doesn't necessarily have to be continual development. Everybody's got different budgets and requirements from their site. But the last thing you want to do is find that you've not touched it for two or three years and all of a sudden you've got a big job. I think we all prefer to spend money in smaller chunks than bigger chunks. Just like with your car.
**\[41:49\]** **Sean:** Exactly. You do your oil change, change the tires and your car lasts a lot longer than if you wait six years. Exactly. It's a different way of doing that.
**\[41:57\]** **Andrew:** Although I said that website maintenance is about the environment that it's in. You can adapt the website so it fits within that environment. The environment will always be moving, but there's no reason why you can't with some fairly small changes very often. Keep pace with what's happening in the wider world.
**\[42:16\]** **Sean:** Excellent. Yeah. So the big takeaway note here, regular maintenance at a minimum, whether that's quarterly or annual, just keep your CMS and your plugins up to date. And then for continual development, as you need to fix little errors or you discover things in A.B. testing or UX experiences or you need data in a new feature, we'll add that kind of stuff in. Yeah. That's right. Excellent. Thank you so much for coming out, Andrew. No problem, Sean. Any time.
**\[42:47\]** **Andrew:** Did you like it to be here?
**\[42:48\]** **Sean:** Andrew, could you tell us where we can find you on the net, or your website, social media, anything else where we can find out more about you?
**\[42:57\]** **Andrew:** Yeah, sure. I hang out on Twitter quite a bit. I don't always tweet every day, but certainly keep up today with what's happening over there at AArmitage. So you can follow me there and our agency website, which has got a great URL, but not so good for SEO, is adigital.agency.
**\[43:16\]** **Sean:** Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share our website, 101Podcast, with friends and colleagues. You can find me at website 101Podcast.com on Twitter, the username at website 101Pod. Do you have a question you want to ask, a topic suggestion, or a guest host recommendation? Send me an email, Sean, S-E-A-N, at caffeinecreations.ca, or visit website 101Podcast.com, slash contact, and fill in the form. You can find me personally online at my company website, caffeinecreations.ca, C-A-F-E-I-N-E, C-R-E-A-T-I-O-N-S dot-C-A. On LinkedIn with username, caffeinecreations, hope you enjoyed this episode. See you next time.
Close Transcript
Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact).
[](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 01
- 1 [ Introduction to Website 101 Podcast](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-1/introduction-to-website-101-podcast/)
- 2 [ Planning, Structure, Goals](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-2/planning-structure-goals/)
- 3 [ Web Design Shortcuts You Should Never Take](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-3/web-design-shortcuts-you-should-never-take/)
- 4 [ Websites Benefit from Continual Development](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-4/websites-benefit-from-continual-development/)
- 5 [ SEO 101](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-5/seo-101/)
- 6 [ Unlocking the Secrets of PPC Advertising with Dan Wood](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-6/ppc-101-pay-per-click/)
- 7 [ PR & Marketing](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-7/pr-marketing/)
- 8 [ Designing Effective Landing Pages for High Conversion Rates](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-8/what-is-a-landing-page/)
- 9 [ Accessibility: Why Your Website Should Be Easy to Use for All](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-9/accessibility-why-its-important/)
- 10 [ DIY Vs Bespoke](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-10/diy-vs-bespoke/)
- 11 [ Season 1 Wrap Up](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-11/season-1-wrap-up/)
### All Seasons
- [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/)
- [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/)
- [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/)
- [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/)
- [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/)
- [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/)
- [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/)
- [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/)
- [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/)
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