Will my website be future proof? What does that even mean?

It’s common enough to see a line item on a website brief that goes something like ‘we would like our website to be future proof’. Got it. But it’s a really loose term. We take it to mean a couple of different things – built on an extendable, open source platform; but also in terms of future proofing for your own organisation. In summary …

And if you’d like to hear how we can take care of future proofing your own website – learn more about our website design & development process.

And a transcription of the video is available too! If you prefer to read than to view …

So what is meant by a future-proof website? What do people mean when they ask will my website be future-proof? Well here’s what we take it to mean. First of all, will the website evolve with our organisation as it grows and morphs over time and will the website be able to keep up with technological developments over time? So organisational future-proofing, often a website project can be tied to a principal driver in the organisation, a single person or group, pushing the project to get it done. And if that person leaves, the rest of the organisation sort of goes, ah, all that knowledge just walked out the door.

And to prevent that we can do a couple of things. The first thing we do is we ensure that you’re left with a set of organised training materials, usually in the form, oh here comes the dog, usually in the form of a video library. You’re provided with a set of videos that allow you to carry out common tasks like editing a page, building new content and so on.

And this means that the knowledge around the web project is distributed and not tied to one person. The second thing we do to make sure our code is simple and maintainable and consistent and just plain old makes sense. And doing this means that if the new person or new team wants to change agency, although why would anyone want to leave, they, you know, they don’t run into problems.

Everything is sensibly coded without proprietary solutions or any other weird surprises. So that’s on the organisational side. On the technological side, what’s important to us here is that the website remains open to connexions to external platforms.

So if you want to add in an AI chat bot or if your organisation changes CRMs or looks at upgrading a donation platform, we’re working with an open source setup, in our case it’s WordPress, so that we can access any of the data in the website and send it to external APIs and connect in any way that they will allow us to do. So we don’t do anything during the project that limits your ability to change technologies or platforms. In fact it’s the opposite.

By using the open source software that securely allows for communications with other platforms, we keep things open and growable, if that’s a real word, I’m not sure it is, but open anyway.