Technology is always advancing, improving our lives, devices get smaller, lighter, battery life is extended, screen resolution improves, internet connections get faster… These are all good things, right?
Well… yes they are generally very good things, but unfortunately for website owners all these advances can cause lots of problems for websites that aren’t ‘future-proofed’. Here are just a few of the ways that the Tribeswell team is working to make our clients’ sites effective far into the future.
Platform Selection
When Tribeswell began, we chose WordPress as our platform because it was free and fairly simple to work with. It also had industry market share at the time.
Now, 5 years later WordPress has grown beyond anything I could have imagined. Its market share has increased exponentially and its functionality has been enhanced to the point that we can now use it to run complex content sites, web apps, and more. Like Apache webserver, its open license has led to widespread adoption and industry domination. WordPress is a safe platform bet for at least the next 5 years and most likely far beyond.
Careful Selection of Technology (Plugins)
As technology has advanced I’ve learned that it is extremely important to carefully select plugins (both WordPress and JavaScript) to ensure that they will continue to work far into the future.
It’s easy to go on GitHub or the WordPress plugin database and find a plugin that will do exactly what you need it to do, but it is critical to also examine the age of the plugin… how often is it being updated… how good is the support…
We are extremely selective about which tools we use to enhance our client sites, because we believe strongly that a website should hold up over time regardless of changes in technology.
Resolution-Proof Design
Between super-hi-res phones and tablets and the new retina laptops that have come out in recent years, it is clear that in the upcoming years this trend will become more the norm and less the exception. What this means to most website owners is your old website, that was optimized for fast page loads with small images… is going to look like crap.
We are looking forward to this trend, because for the last few years we’ve been taking proactive steps to make our websites ‘retina-proof’. We use CSS to scale down larger images so they retain their sharpness at high resolution and we are selective about image sizes. We even save multiple sizes of each image and use code to serve up the proper size image to the user.
We also use tools like FontAwesome icons, IonIcons, or custom designed SVGs whenever possible to ensure every graphic on our client websites looks as absolutely sharp and perfect as possible at every screen resolution.
Best Practices
One thing I never want to have to say to a client is… “Well, it was a best practice at the time.”
As a development firm, we are entrusted on a daily basis to make decisions on behalf of our clients, some of which could have pretty drastic consequences in the future. It is important to us from a culture standpoint and from a client success standpoint that we always have the practice of second-guessing best practices to determine not only what the current best practices are, but also what they will be in the future.
Responsive Layouts
The first time I used Google Glass, guess what I did? I pulled up one of our client sites to make sure it worked… What happened? It was an awesome experience. It worked perfectly.
The reason it worked perfect is that we make every website so that it is optimized at every screen size. Whether that screen is on a phone, a tablet, a wide screen monitor, or a smart-glass prism, responsive layouts ensure the ultimate future-proof website.
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