Once in a while I come across a customer that would rather update an old site than have it redesigned. That’s tough for a designer because 9 times out of 10 that old site is hideous I feel should be abandoned for a more updated look. But in the cash strapped land we live in, that’s not always an option. I recently got a job updating a site that was a few years old and done by the site owner’s son. The site was originally built in Microsoft Frontpage and had a few issues. Here is what I did to make it better:

1. In order for the owner to continue to manage her site we took the site from framesets to single page with an IFRAME. I’m not a huge IFRAME fan but it worked better than the old framesets and allowed for the owners son to continue updating the pages as he always had.
2. Navigation. On the old site they were using Microsoft Javascript calls to load the pages. The navigation consisted on 4 SELECT boxes and really needed a better mechanism for SEO. So I took the 4 SELECT boxes and put all the page links into an accordion style navigation list and made a few adjustments. The accordion style setup allowed all teh links to be found inside hidden DIVs and would allow for better search engine access than trying to decipher the Javascript.
3. Added pages for ones “under construction”. The clients site really only had about 7 actual pages and some of those were an “under construction” page that they were eventually going to fill in. For better SEO, I created the other pages and tried to add some keywords in each so that the search engines had something to look at. This site was at least a few years old so I did ask the client if they actually wanted links for those pages and they assured me that it was needed so I thought creating the pages would be a good start and then they could just insert the copy into those pages as they created it.
4. META tags. I’ve seen lots of sites over the years where no one bothered to go in and add META tags. This site didn’t have any at all so I went into every page an added the META structure and added basic keywords and a description.
5. In a complete redesign I would do a W3C validation check. Doing a validation check on what is now a Frankenstein site of MS Frontpage code and XHTML would have put me over my allotted time. If you have the time to re-validate these site I would definitely recommend you take the time to do that so that your SEO plan is hindered by messy code.
6. Add a favicon. I love looking up in my browser’s tab bar and seeing the icons for the sites I have up. If the client has a logo that can be made into a nice favicon I recommend doing that. Here’s a site for generating a favicon from a JPEG.
7. Re-evaluate hosting. Hosting accounts have definitely become cheaper over the years. Review with the client what they are paying and see if you can save them money by either switching their hosting account to a cheaper place or if you’re like me and host your own sites, see if you can save the client some money by switching them over to you and give them a discount if they pay for a full year. I recommend HostGator as an affordable solution if you don’t host yourself.
8. Re-submit to search engines. After launching the site on the web server, re-submit the site to Google, Yahoo, Bing and the Open Directory Project. Do a re-submit just makes sure that the search engines add the site to the list to re-spyder after you do your update. It can’t hurt to resubmit after an update to the any site.

Updating a website like this can breath at least a bit more life into an old site. When the site gets to be over 5 years old, it’s time to really do an overhaul but just doing a few minor tweaks and updating to current standards can get you by until the next re-design.

I recently setup an account with Typekit.com. If you haven’t heard of TypeKit before and you’re a web designer, you should take a look at it. TypeKit is a subscription based service that allows you to embed fonts into your webpages that would not otherwise be one of the 10 web safe fonts. For me this has been a real pain over the years when you start designing a site and are stuck using one of the 10 fonts when they just don’t quite flow with the design. I setup a “Portfolio” account that allows for custom fonts to be used on up to 5 websites. I was able to setup a kit and add a font to it and then embed the code in my CMS template and then use the CSS selectors to place the font on my pages content. What an amazing difference from using the old fonts for all those years! Checkout Typekit.com and start escaping the inflexibility of the safe 10!