Companies and institutions, stop neglecting your websites

Introduction

Having a website for any type of activity is essential. One of the first things a reasonable person does when learning about a new business is googling it. This is especially true for organisations dedicated to education, public service, and culture.

Having a website, or at least an online presence, is paramount to the success of any business, even local businesses. I will not try to convince you why, this article should do so. I personally think that every serious person who likes to share their opinions online should have a personal website. It makes them impervious to censorship.

Ok, you already have a website; what does neglecting it even mean?

Neglect

One way to lose points in the digital space is by neglecting your website. Not updating it or leaving it vulnerable and ugly. Many times I visit websites that include malware, phishing, or are straight out ugly and unresponsive. Websites with announcements about events that date back to the Stone Age Heavy CMS for a one-page website. Unthinkable amount of ads, banners, and pop-ups. These are instances of neglect; neglecting the user experience of your website visitors.

The worst thing that could happen is when malware finds its way through and sits unbothered on a website. Yesterday, I got to experience this. I went into an institution's website, clicked on a link that was in the menu, and got a gazillion of redirections before landing on a fishy website telling me I won an iPhone. The institution is legitimate, and the malware is as well. I searched a bit on the web and found out that it contained malware—a trojan, to be more specific—that targets Android devices.

The impact of a neglected website:

• Losing customer trust
• Exposing visitors to malware
• Losing potential customers
• Inspiring a bad reputation
• Making peoples' life harder than it is 👀

Solutions

Define your needs

Your local bakery may not need a CMS-based website. It may need, at most, a landing page that presents the business. Your local pizza place may need more than a landing page; it may also need an ordering service. Either way, the needs should be defined. This way, you extrapolate the vision for your client's experience when visiting your website. You should have full control of the image you want to draw, the message you want to communicate, and the feeling you want to entice in your interlocutor.

Let's take the example of a bakery. I'm not a marketing specialist, but I would boldly suggest that it should have a warm colour scheme with artistically produced pictures of some baguettes.

A pizza place website would surely need a more dynamic approach to it. With an accessible, detailed menu and an ordering system, it will motivate the visitor to make an order, or at least consider physically visiting the place.

Call a professional

While a lot of imposters exist in the tech scene to win a quick buck, calling a professional to help you maintain your website is not a bad idea. I would even recommend it. A professional should keep your website secure, patch the systems, and help you generate traffic.

Let's imagine that your website is down while you are immersed in your daily routine and wouldn't be able to intervene to solve the availability problem of your system. Would you even be aware of such problems? Well, a professional should. Most professionals take a proactive approach to monitoring systems by actively preventing them from suffering outages. You don't have time for that if you have a serious business, of course. Having a professional manage your website doesn't only save you time—having to figure out how to manage things on your own or respond to such incidents—it will most definitely save you money in the long run. While having an outage on your website may seem trivial, it is often the gateway to your other services, which will most certainly suffer, and it may cost you more than what you would pay a professional for a year. Think of it this way: "This guy does this for a living." Aside from the fact that they will tailor their competencies to suit your needs, they may even give you advice on how to approach certain subjects.

Choosing a professional

Speaking of imposters, these are some basic boxes a professional should check before you consider hiring them:

• They should have a degree, certifications in the subject, or at the very least an extensive portfolio of what they are capable of.
• Good communication skills and rigour.
• Doesn't shy away from giving you solid advice even if you don't want to hear it.

Don't procrastinate

If you are tech-savvy enough, you would rule out the need to call a professional, in which case you have to do the work. Hackers keep scanning IPs and domains to find vulnerable websites. They attack everything and everyone without discrimination. Maybe that day you didn't patch Wordpress was the day they exploited a well-known vulnerability, and now your website is a distributor of malware to everybody visiting your website.

Conclusion

This is not a technical post; this is a reminder. I was really furious yesterday to have fallen victim to malware on the website of a trustworthy educational institution. Please keep your websites clean.