What a Locally Maintained Website Does That a Template Doesn’t
Search for web design in Florence, Alabama, and some of what comes back is automatically generated pages from out-of-state agencies, with the city’s name dropped into a template. A Florence business owner comparing options should know what the real difference is between a site somebody builds and maintains for them and a template sold from a distance. It comes down to a few things. It changes when the business changes A business changes all the time: new hours, a new service, a staff change, a festival weekend. A maintained website gets those changes the week they happen. A template that nobody looks after keeps saying whatever was true on the day it went live. Somebody answers the phone When a form stops sending or a page breaks, the question is who fixes it and how fast. With a site built and maintained by one person who knows it, the answer is a phone call to that person. With a template from a distance, it is often a support ticket. It is written about Florence A site written by somebody who works in Florence can say true, specific things about where the business is and who it serves: the University of North Alabama student population that turns over every year, the visitors who come for the W. C. Handy Music Festival or the Alabama Renaissance Faire, the downtown. A template can only swap the city name in. It is kept up to date underneath Every website needs WordPress, plugin and security updates, with a backup taken before they run. On a maintained site that happens every month without the owner having to think about it. On a site nobody maintains, it does not happen, and the first sign may be a broken page or a browser warning. More on that in An Out-of-Date Theme Is Not a Cosmetic Problem. What to ask before choosing Whoever a Florence business picks, it is worth asking who will update the site and how often, who to call when something breaks, and what happens to the site and the domain name if the business ever moves to somebody else. JM Marketing builds, hosts and maintains websites for businesses in Florence and across the Shoals. See website design in Florence, AL, or call Jeff McDaniel at 662-422-1809.
An Out-of-Date Theme Isn’t a Cosmetic Problem
When people think about an out-of-date website, they picture it looking dated. That’s the smallest part of it. Website software — WordPress itself, the theme, every plugin — gets security fixes the same way your phone does. When a flaw is found, it’s fixed and then published. That publication is the point: the moment a fix is announced, the flaw becomes public knowledge, and every unpatched site running that version becomes a listed target. Automated tools scan the whole internet looking for them. It isn’t personal and nobody chose your business. You’re a version number on a list. Going through the sites we host, we found one running a commercial theme several versions behind, sitting inside published security advisories — including one that doesn’t require anyone to log in or click anything. And the theme licence had lapsed, which meant it couldn’t receive updates even if someone had tried. That’s the trap with commercial themes and plugins. The licence isn’t just support. It’s the update channel. Let it lapse and the software keeps working, looks fine, and silently stops receiving fixes. We found no sign that site had been broken into. But we did find another, years ago, where a redirect had been injected through an administrator’s own browser session and sat there for months sending visitors somewhere else. Nobody noticed, because it only fired for visitors arriving from search. What we do about it now: every site we host gets its versions checked against published advisories as a routine item, not a favour. Lapsed licences get flagged. And anything that can’t be patched gets a plan rather than a hope. If you don’t know whether your theme is current, that’s worth ten minutes of somebody’s time this week.
We Took a Website Off Its Page Builder. It Got Faster and Safer.
Most WordPress sites are built with a page builder — a drag-and-drop layer that sits on top of WordPress and makes design possible without writing code. They’re genuinely useful. We use one on plenty of sites. They have two costs that nobody mentions at the start. The first is that your content stops being yours in a practical sense. A page builder stores your text in its own format. Switch the builder off and your carefully written pages turn into a mess of unreadable codes. You’re not locked in by a contract, you’re locked in by the file format, which is harder to escape. The second is maintenance. A page builder is a large piece of third-party software with full access to your site. It needs updating like anything else. When a site stops being updated — which happens to every site somebody stopped paying attention to — the builder goes stale along with the theme, and stale software is how sites get broken into. We recently rebuilt a small site that had been sitting untouched on an old theme for years. Rather than update the builder, we moved the site onto plain WordPress — no builder at all, using the editor that comes with it. The result: nothing third-party left to keep patched, the content stored as ordinary web page code that will still make sense in ten years, and a site that loads faster because there’s simply less of it. It isn’t the right answer for every site. A complex site with a lot of design in it needs the tools. But for a small site that mostly needs to say who you are, what you do and how to reach you, a builder is a dependency you’re carrying for no return. Worth asking about yours.