Well \u2013 sure they are. But the ease <\/em>of maintaining them can vary a lot. For example\u2026 I\u2019ve recently worked for a client integrating a blog into an existing site. The site is only about 2 years old, but it has a couple of major strikes against it in terms of maintainability.<\/p>\n The site was coded using a layout technique called tables. <\/strong>Tables have been around for a long time, but most professional developers moved away from them in the last several years in favor of CSS (cascading style sheets) for laying out sites.<\/p>\n What\u2019s wrong with tables?<\/strong> One of the biggest problems is the large amount of excess code it adds to each page. Several extra lines of code are added for each bit of content in a table-based layout. For a complex design, this can really add up. It can also impact the speed of a site \u2013 larger pages load more slowly.<\/p>\n Making changes to a table-based site can be frustrating, complicated and slow. Wading through all that extra stuff takes time and it increases maintenance costs, and it\u2019s sure a lot easier to make mistakes when working on one.<\/p>\n The site has a menu that uses images instead of text. <\/strong>Using images for menu links was long considered taboo if you were trying to improve search engine rankings because Google\u2019s bots supposedly couldn\u2019t follow image links. That\u2019s not so much an issue now \u2013 but what was a problem is the enormous amount of code used on my client\u2019s site to \u2018power\u2019 the menu.<\/p>\n To illustrate the difference between a simple text menu (which we could easily make look almost identical to the old image-based menu), I copied and pasted the code into a file for my client to check out. The code to run just the image menu took up over four pages<\/em>. That was a shock to me, because it\u2019s all completely unnecessary. In contrast, the code for the new menu took up about \u00bd of a page.<\/p>\n Removing all that extra code will benefit the site in a few ways; first, it\u2019s a slow site anyway. It\u2019s slow enough that when you run a mouse down the menu, there\u2019s a delay for each menu item while the browser gets the next image from the server.<\/p>\n And maintenance of the menu? If you don\u2019t have the original image files and fonts, you\u2019re out of luck. Each menu button has to be created from scratch, and adding a new button (i.e., a new page on the website) is a minor nightmare.<\/p>\n So what happened with the project?<\/strong><\/p>\n The site is small and the pages are not very complex, so they\u2019ll stay in tables for now. But the client agreed to have us replace the menu with one that looks the same, but uses far less code. Each page on the site will probably be reduced about 60-70% in size which should speed up loading time. Plus, if the client decides to add new pages in the future, it will be an easy task to expand the number of links in the menu.<\/p>\n Ease of maintenance is an idea that doesn\u2019t always pop up in a client\u2019s mind during the web development process. But care \u2013 and a little forethought – during development can really decrease the time and money a business owner may eventually spend on his or her site down the road.<\/p>\n – Debbie<\/em><\/p>\n![\"website](\"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/website-maintenence.jpg\" "\\"website")
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