So I just finished a website for a local architect.I learned a lot from redesigning and redeveloping this website.
When people say update website I used to think it was B.S. but after going through the code on this particular site, I saw alot of errors. They might not have been errors when it was made but, they were now. These errors and mistakes may be no big deal to the site visually and will still look ok even with the newer web browsers but it does affect you in other areas you might not have thought about.
The website was up for about two years and it never showed up on search engines. The reason to this was that the site was using frames for a sideshow. As we all know one way to make sure your site doesn’t show up on search engines is to use frames. Each image was actually a web page itself, this was not only hindering the site on search engines but also making a site look way bigger than it actually was. The site with as it was set up with the frames and alot of extra unnecessary material was 25.9 MB, which is pretty big for a website with no multimedia. When I finished recoding it, the size went down to 10.5 MB and that was with about 8 webpages added to it, and one of them with alot of images. That is a big difference, the site now is lighter and loads faster.
Not only was the site using frames, there was basically no description to anything. So someone could see the website visually but if you looked at the code you could never tell what the website was about. The site was also made a few years back, so I had to recode it from scratch and make it validate with W3 validator. The site is now properly described and I am not doing any offsite SEO on it, so I think it should start ranking in a few months.
In all navigation was redeveloped, look was redesigned, and added a few extra functionalities. Clients were happy, its all good. As they way clients are always right.