A website that stops updating starts lying.
Webpages found their market before almost anything else online. Every business got one, because every other had one. Then they froze. Take a clinic. The doctor is away Thursday and Friday, the site can't say so, and patients phone. A price went up in March; the site shows last year's. Nobody stopped caring. Updating was the pain. Aaron Edwards' sister bought hosting and a domain and gave up at fifty plugins (exhibit 1).
My sister needed a new website. Had already bought WordPress hosting and a domain. Couldn't figure out how to build a site. 50 plugins preinstalled, upgrade notices everywhere, overwhelming. I've been in WP for over 15yrs I no longer can build a site with it.
So the updates moved to Instagram, where a change takes a minute and everyone sees it. The site kept the stock photos. And the effort followed the updates: a story a day there, nothing here.
“Their website shows stock photos. Their Instagram shows today's story. The traffic they work for every day lands on an address they don't own.”
It shows in what the sites can do. Four in five small-business websites cannot take a payment (chart 2). Brochures, because nobody touches them. The fix is a site the owner changes the way they post a story: send a message, done. And it says so: “Last updated today at 8:31am”. Make the site the easiest thing to update and it becomes the thing worth updating. That is the site we build.