Do we start again, or can you just change what we have?

Last week I was on a call with three directors of a research consultancy. They had a short list of things they wanted fixed on their website. Tags had stopped appearing when they added a new post. The projects page had no filter, so they were keeping most of their projects off it. They wanted profiles for the associates they work with around the world. All reasonable. Then one of them asked the question everybody asks at that point. We would be building again, but you do not have to completely start from scratch, do you, it is just a case of shifting it onto a new thing?

The furniture moves. The house does not.

Your content comes with you. The words, the images, the project records, the posts, the people. All of that is data, and data can be moved. What cannot come with you is the thing holding it up.

So it is a bit like taking the same furniture into a new house. The furniture is fine. You still have to build the house, and you still have to decide which room everything goes in. That second part is where the real work sits, and it is usually the part people end up enjoying, because it is the first time in years anyone has asked them where things should go and why.

Why changing the old one can cost more than building a new one

Their site was built by one person who is no longer with us. He built his own system instead of using something off the shelf, and he was proud of it. He may well have been right that it was better than the alternatives at the time. The trouble is that when he went, the instructions went with him. There is no documentation. There are no blueprints.

So if you ask me to put the tags back, I cannot just put the tags back. Somebody has to open it up, work out how it was built, work out what else moves when you touch that part, and only then make the change. You are paying for the understanding before you pay for the work. On a small job, the understanding costs more than the job.

The other thing that has changed is the building. Making a website is a lot quicker than it was when that one was made, so the comparison people have in their heads is often a few years out of date. I am not saying rebuild is always the answer. I am saying the gap between the two is narrower than it feels, and sometimes it points the other way.

How I would decide

• If the list of changes is short and all in one corner of the site, patch it and keep the money for something that grows the business.
• If the list keeps getting longer while you talk about it, price up both routes and compare them properly.
• If nobody can tell you how the current site actually works, treat every change as more expensive than it looks, because it is.
• If you do build again, buy the documentation as part of it, in writing, so the next person is not sitting in this conversation.

We left that call with no decision, which was the right outcome. They are going away to think about which of the three routes they want, and I would far rather they chose slowly than got talked into the bigger one on a Friday afternoon.

The question is never really patch or rebuild. It is whether anybody still alive can explain how the thing you own was put together. If the answer is no, you are not maintaining a website. You are negotiating with one.