Website Years?

[PrawnDog]

I did a site back in 2000 for a local health related business (just a brochure site, no e-commerce), and updated it in 2002 (mostly I think I just added more table cell graphics ). I suggested back in 2005 that it needed redesigning, but they never responded. An opportunity arose recently to suggest it again, and now it seems they are more interested. Its a site that could be good, but is currentlt dragging my portfolio down.

In drawing up proposals, i got to thinking about website years, you know, like dog years but for site designs. It seems to me that 1 human year is about 20 site years: after 1 year (20 site years) the site is leaving adolescence, after 2 (40 site years) it's hitting a mid-life crisis, and after 4 years (80 site years) it's in its old age.

Is there a better rule of thumb anywhere?

[Tailslide]

Never thought of it like that but you're about right I'd say.

I'd say that a more limiting factor is the designer's own skills and how they expand over time.  For example, sites that I did 3 years ago look reasonable still (at least to me) but I've learnt so much more about stuff like accessibility that I'm vaguely embarrassed by them. 

If you look hard enough there's even a table-based layout out there (I only did one) which I did for a OU course - one of these days that will come back to haunt me  .  I've even offered the guy a free upgrade to a nice neat CSS layout but he's one of those types that never ever gets back to you.

It reaches a point where, frankly, you need to dump stuff out of your Portfolio if you think it is counter-productive. 

[Fallen Angel]

Ah yes, those embarassments. I have one of my early sites, one of the first CSS layouts that was my pride and joy at the time (Tail knows which one I mean) - it's got a tempramental stylesheet switcher, it took me weeks of faffing about to get the tabbed menu working right, and was a total nightmare from start to finish. Visually it doesn't look too bad, but it's looking distinctly middle-aged now

On the positive side, the organisation I did it for's winding up - but, they want to keep the info online so the're paying me some cash to continue to pay the hosting etc. for as long as the cash lasts to keep it online. First option though is to pass it onto another like minded organisation, and I've got a meeting with them at the end of the month to go through what's involved, but if they do want to take it on the site'll need a bit of a re-vamp, so I could well get a chance to ditch that nasty JS switcher and stick in the lovely easy-peasy-PHP one.

[rdouglass]

...snip...It reaches a point where, frankly, you need to dump stuff out of your Portfolio if you think it is counter-productive. 

I find my portfolio turning over about every 9 months to 1 year.  This stuff changes sooooo fast as to what the client expectations are.  Our goal (at least IMO) should be to keep our skillsets up-to-par so that we *can* keep our portfolio fresh and current.

A lot of my portfolio is now ecomm stuff, CRM stuff, and a few AJAX examples thrown in for good measure but I'm not sure what it will look like in 1 year.  I am confident however, that it will be different.