Today's CMS Websites are more complex, and preventative maintenance is more critical than ever for your website's health and performance.

I Design is starting the new year with a focus on website maintenance, compliance policies and accessibility. We'll be posting another blog article later this month about how we can help your website avoid lawsuits and protect personal information with dynamic compliance policies that update as new laws are published.

But, the focus today is on maintenance plans. You know that your website needs maintenance, but what types of maintenance does a website need? Does my website require a monthly plan, or a quarterly plan? As you can expect, the plans are suited to match the complexity and types of websites you have.

We decided to get an unbiased opinion regarding maintenance by generating the text below from ChatGPT with the prompt "Do CMS websites need regular maintenance?" (Out of curiosity, we also generated the AI graphic above with Firefly using the prompt, "Generate an AI prompt").

From ChatGPT:

Yes, all CMS (Content Management System) websites need regular maintenance to ensure they perform well, stay secure, and remain up-to-date with the latest features. Here's why regular maintenance is essential:

The last five months have been a whirlwind of web wizardry. We've been working hard, juggling tight deadlines, all while getting into the festive spirit with a pinch of Christmas cheer and a dash of Mardi Gras madness.

I'd like to show off the fab five website jobs below completed from September '23 to February '24.

Surveying the landscape before drafting the blueprints

You'll find the following text on our About page:

"We don't force you to use technology that maximizes our profit. We discuss your needs, then build a website that maximizes your investment."

These aren't empty words, and the website projects below are perfect examples of how we can "maximize your investment." 

Websites can be more than marketing tools

Stafford Tile & Stone has been a great client of ours since 2008, and we built a new website for them in 2012. It's gone through a series of facelifts and upgrades over the years, but it was still mostly a marketing tool. That has changed now since Peggy Stafford contacted us a few months ago with some great new directives. "We need more out of our website. We need for it to be the Stafford Tile location that is always open and always available for our customers."

I've been in many situations where a developer purchases a domain name for a client, and shortly thereafter the parties split ways. The client then hires me, and now we have to go through the domain transfer process. Many times there's no friction from the jilted party, but sometimes it can be a mess.

As a website developer who primarily builds content management system websites on established CMS platforms, I always had a bad feeling about Squarespace, Wix, Weebly and other "do it yourself" website tools. I'd wonder, "Will these services eventually take over the small business market? Will I lose business to these guys?"

Lately I've been contacting the clients that host websites at I Design about the importance of adding Transport Layer Security or a Secure Sockets Layer certificate (SSL) to their website hosting package. In the past, SSL was reserved for websites that shared sensitive data with users or sold products. But that has changed and in today's world, secure websites are a must. 

Leger & Shaw is a full service law firm concentrating in maritime law and class actions & complex litigation. They hired a national company to build their original website, but they became frustrated with the poor design and lack of service and learned that bigger is not always better.

In my last news article, Does your website need a hero image?, I questioned whether following this layout trend was absolutely necessary. But I also mentioned that most of my new sites utilize photo sliders on the home page. So, if you're going to use a hero image or a big image slider on your home page, think about how it should look and work. Here are some basic rules to consider.