Engineering · 5 min
A website is a system
Launch is one day. What you can still maintain in two years is what decides whether it was worth it.
A website is more than the screenshots signed off before launch. It is content, navigation, components and a set of operational decisions, and all of it has to keep working while the business changes around it.
A small component library makes updates cheap without making every page look the same. Define the building blocks, write down what each is for, and refuse the one-off exception that only one person understands.
Pick the simplest architecture that meets the requirement. An agency website rarely needs a database of its own. A portal does. A SaaS product needs accounts, billing and a way to undo a bad deploy. Matching the tool to the job is the whole of the engineering decision.
Write the handover as if you will not be there. Someone else should know how to edit the content, who holds the accounts, how a deploy happens and how to undo a mistake. A site is only dependable if somebody other than us can look after it.
Two years on, the questions that matter are dull. Can a new page be added without a developer? Do the dependencies still build? Does the person who pays the hosting invoice know where the login is? Design for those questions on day one.