You Hate Your Website, Who’s To Blame?

When a website is frustrating to update and use, it can be cathartic to vent about it. We spend a lot of time working with, in, and on our websites. And it’s just software, after all. Text and code, and websites are not sentient (um, so far, I think?). 

But most likely, a number of people–working in various contexts, with different kinds of challenges and constraints–made the many decisions that created a website that’s frustrating you right now.  And when a site isn’t working for an organization, it can be tempting to look for someone or something to blame. 

We see this all the time, clients come to us frustrated with their old sites, with theories as to why their sites are so maddening. At this point, we’ve heard it all. 

So, if you’re in this boat right now with an irksome website, who’s to blame? As designers and developers, we have some insight into this. As well as into the age-old question: is it possible to future-proof your next site to prevent this from happening? 

Blame the CMS Software

Drupal, WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly, Joomla, their names are funny. That can make it extra fun to blame these systems. Content editors may spend hours per week, or even per day, in these editing interfaces. Every little bug or quirk can feel like a paper cut, and those can add up, making a poor editing experience or a buggy front-end a daily trial. Are these systems just junk? Where should we direct our desire to throw our sites, and perhaps even our entire laptops, out a window or into the sea? 

It is important that the Content Management System (CMS) you’re using is a good match for the scope and size of your organization and its communications needs. Your site’s content and its audiences evolve. Most successful organizations outgrow click-together-friendly systems like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly, and for good reason. Once the limitations of these systems are making your work harder rather than easier, you’ll be best served by professional, custom website design and development that is far more robust. 

Open source CMS platforms are built and supported by global communities of developers and users instead of by VC-funded proprietary companies. As such, there are many vendors from which to choose. The best open source platforms come with robust communities that offer recipes and ongoing learning. This is why we favor open source CMS for nonprofits and higher ed. So let’s focus on the top two of these (Forbes agrees with us, FWIW): Drupal and WordPress. 

Many clients come to us with one kind of site or the other, saying things like:

“Drupal sucks, please rebuild our site in WordPress!” 

Or vice-versa. The fact is that there are many kinds of sites that do better in one system or the other, and perhaps you’ve got a mismatch between what you need and the system itself.  This is the kind of thing we routinely help our clients sort out during the initial phase of a project.  

But there may also be other reasons your site is buggy or unfriendly. It’s possible that your site was built with best practices from a few years ago. Because web tech moves quickly, a site that’s 3+ years old can be an absolute relic if it hasn’t been kept up to date under the hood, or by proactively keeping pace with what its primary audiences need.

And because an open source CMS is like a box of LEGOs, there are many ways to build a site with them. Perhaps your site was built poorly, and there are a few key reasons that can happen. Which brings us to a sensitive topic,

Blame the Developers

Yes, poor web design and development practices can ruin a site’s long-term usability for editors, as well as for target audiences. When undertaking a WordPress or Drupal project, it’s very important to look for designers and developers who understand things like web accessibility, performance, and design trends, including why those trends are trendy, and whether they may be worth spending budget on. 

Also, especially in open source web development, there are often multiple ways to build a feature. One method might be faster and less expensive, and the other might take a bit longer but hold up better over time. Ideally, your development partner should be transparent with you about these tradeoffs, and should help you consider them alongside your goals, budget, and timeline. 

The best development partners are steeped in the Drupal and WordPress communities, as well as the nonprofit technology community. It’s in these communities where information designers, visual designers, and coders share recipes and patterns, successes and failures. 

At the risk of sounding defensive, though, even the best developers can build a terrible website. How can this happen? 

Because, also key: a really good partner brings their expertise to the table, and pushes back against requests that will take a website off-course from your project goals, accessibility, and sustainability. Sometimes, forces within an organization get in the way and limit our ability to follow best practices. 

Blame Yourselves

I spent the first half of my career as a “webmaster” in nonprofit organizations (that job title alone tells you that was a long time ago). I saw patterns there that I still see today. In my nonprofit jobs, we almost always had a mental model of how our organization’s information should be sorted and presented and, well, we would just put that on the web and make it clickable (and sometimes add some Flash animation because why not). That was before the notion of building for the end-user, or target audiences, was considered the gold standard. 

Organizations still come to us wanting a “clickable org chart on the web”. Or sometimes, a higher-up inside an org, a prominent board member, or a funder will be enamored of a particular technology trend (cough AI cough), taxonomy structure, feature set, or visual design aesthetic that may be at odds with your long-term goals. When leadership doesn’t value outside expertise to check these assumptions, projects can get knocked off course. 

A good internal steward (the person we call the “client lead”) can often work with a trusted development partner to find constructive ways to herd these cats, and steer the project toward excellence. 

But sometimes, the internal forces are too great. If you can acknowledge this at the outset of a project, and be up front about it, a good web design and development partner may be able to help you mitigate some of the trouble these internal tensions can cause. 

TL;DR Who, Actually Though, Is To Blame? 

At the end of the day, any organization that’s doing good work is growing and evolving along with the issues you’re working on and the people you’re serving. Software systems and good technology practices also continually change. It can be really tough to keep up with all of this. When you haven’t been able to keep pace with ongoing change, for whatever reasons, the most important thing is to understand that it’s time to approach your website in a new way. 

Partner with an expert who will guide you through planning. Understand that a great website is only ever somewhat complete. Whenever possible, plan for continual, ongoing user testing and enhancements into the future, to keep your site’s design, code, content, and editing interface evolving. This doesn’t mean you won’t ever need a redesign again. But when you do, you’ll have a better sense of what needs addressing and why, without having to blame anyone at all.