Website serviceability: what it gives you and how to achieve it
While striving to “polish” all sites to perfection, along with the tips on improving their navigation, enhancing their security, availability, and much more, we would now like to discuss the essential quality of website serviceability. What does serviceability mean? It may sound a little vague, and perhaps remind you of a car service station. Actually, that’s a pretty good example of what it is.
Websites, just like cars, should be able to run at a good speed, stay secure, be equipped with the latest goodies, and, in case of any failure, be repaired in a flash. Coming to a service station, no car owner would like to hear that changing the wheels requires dismantling their car and take two weeks.
Instead, they will be happy to know that everything can be done before they finish their cup of coffee at the station, and that they can also easily do some things by themselves and save money. This is the essence of serviceability!
Website serviceability (maintainability): a closer look
When it comes to websites, serviceability, aka maintainability, implies their ability to be quickly, easily and safely:
- modified
- extended
- updated
- fixed
These manipulations will be necessary, sooner or later, to let you keep in tune with the times and your business needs, and have an up-to-date and well-protected website.
A serviceable site will certainly save you a lot of money. Firstly, the maintenance budget is directly related to the time and effort the developers need to spend. Secondly, in plenty of routine tasks, it should be easy for site administrators to do without the developers or designers at all.
What does website serviceability depend on?
Above all, it depends on how your site has been built. The code should be clean and easy to read, and it should be understood by other — or even by the same — developers after some time passes and maintenance is needed. Though understandable and self-explanatory, the code can be additionally explained by comments in places where necessary. It should adhere to the coding standards, formatting guidelines and development practices, and be consistent throughout the website.
Everything can be improved, including this!
Here at Drudesk support and maintenance service, we see hundreds of websites, some of which have been built properly with standards and serviceability in mind, and some that certainly have not.
No worries! It’s never too late to improve a site’s maintainability. Thanks to our services like code review, we can discover faults and optimize the website so it becomes much cleaner and easier to work with.
The “service station” matters ;)
Please remember that it’s not only website serviceability itself that is important, but also the expertise of people who are going to maintain it. It’s always easier for experienced developers to make their way through the dirtiest code and most complicated cases.
Choose Drudesk to maintain your site, check what can be improved, or increase its serviceability.
And let your “shiny car” win any business race!