Don’t let your digital platforms grow stale

How long should your website last? As someone who sells websites, it’s a question I’ve often been asked, and often bluffed my way through answering.

The exact number of years has been fluctuating for a long time. Many years ago, they could easily last for a decade. Then came broadband, and mobile and ever-present video, and standards were suddenly shifting so fast that you’d need a new one every year or so to really keep up.

Now I think we might be calming down again, and a good website can probably quite easily survive – nay, thrive – for five to ten years once again.

Video games are the perfect analogy for this. Once we jumped from 2D to 3D to HD, progress became much more incremental. Compare, say, the jump from the Super Nintendo to the N64 with the Switch to the Switch 2. Even a Nintendo fangirl like me must acknowledge that technology is not evolving as rapidly as it once was.

This means the major shifts aren’t as regular – but the minor shifts are probably more frequent than ever. The little things we need to do to keep our long-serving digital platforms ahead of the curve just keep popping up.

Plan ahead for digital transformations

Doing things costs money, of course but it’s worth coming to terms with sooner rather than later. You shouldn’t view your website as ‘finished’ – ideally, you should have a long-term plan for its maintenance and improvement beyond hosting and plugin updates, with budget put aside where you can.

I have plenty of conversations around budget-setting time to see what can be done over the coming year at venues that know they need to keep working on their site to keep up with their users. I also have plenty of conversations throughout the rest of the year when clients need an issue sorting but don’t’ have the budget for it.

Embrace device agnosticism as behaviour changes

For years we’ve been talking about ‘mobile first’ in web design with the majority of website briefs requesting ‘mobile first design’. It has led to websites that are thinking a little bit smaller, prioritising how content will look squished into a small frame, to the detriment of a fuller screen experience.

But phones are getting bigger again. The population is ageing and old people love tablets. Desktop/laptop remains at about 40% of global internet traffic, depending on who you ask, accounting for two billion people worldwide.

While mobile still leads the way, it’s worth thinking a bit bigger again. Focus on parity of experience, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach that favours the smaller screen. Use the space you’ve got to deliver something special for users who consider booking tickets to be a proper laptop job. They’re probably the ones that like you the most.

Avoid iframes and offsite bookings where you can

I’m seeing standards consistently rise in the quality of booking sites. All web developers are pushing the boat out in terms of delivering streamlined and elegant solutions.

We’ve been working with box office CRMs for so long now that we know how they work inside and out. We know when to use out-of-the-box features, and when to build something bespoke.

One thing that’s falling out of favour is booking pathways that take you to a different site – whether a subdomain or entirely external portal. It damages trust, frustrates users and doubles the risk of downtime. If your bookings are offsite, it might be time to rethink.

And if onsite, iframes that simply pull in baseline functionality from different platforms are looking dated too. They often scale awkwardly on phones and require lots of pinching and zooming to navigate them effectively. More and more, fully API-driven solutions are becoming the norm, and their costs are becoming more affordable as we use them more.

Create content that targets new audiences

Technology isn’t the only thing that can get stale – old content regularly needs a refresh too. If your content hasn’t already been drawing in the traffic you want, it’s not going to start any time soon without changing things up.

I’m a massive proponent of websites needing more content. The trend lately is towards cutting content – the number of words per page, the number of pages – but I say, more. More!

Targeted landing pages focused on specific audiences, whether for SEO or PPC activity, are essential for attracting new users to your site. You can’t rely on branded search and name recognition of performers to reach people who have never heard of your venue.

This should be the easiest thing to do on a website. Not everyone can pivot easily to API integrations, even on a newer site – but if you can’t even make new pages, you really need a new one.

If we must talk about AI…

Is AI the answer to innovation? Lots of people think so, but it often isn’t . More often than not, AI is a solution looking for a problem.

I’m an AI sceptic, but we do use it at Splitpixel. Devs use it to troubleshoot, for example, because it beats hours searching Stack Overflow. Our hosting platform utilises AI monitoring and optimisation, because it beats websites going down in the middle of the night. But is it the right solution to every problem? Definitely not.

If you’re keen to use AI to innovate, I’d first ask you what it is you want to achieve. What problems do you to address, what improvements do you want to make? AI might be the answer – sure – but there may be an alternative that’s better for the environment.

It never stops

I’ll probably write this article again in a year or so, with different suggestions and a new set of cultural reference points. That’s just how it goes. Embrace it. You might as well. There’s no other option, anyway.