Without a doubt, one of most common ways a webmaster can make life difficult for themselves is by building a website, putting it up on the Web, and letting it slowly become more and more dated; depriving it of any powerful new features and rendering it unable to take advantage of time saving and efficient new technologies. It can be hard, I know, to drag a six or seven year old website kicking and screaming into the shiny new world of the state of the art - but oh so worth it if you do.

The prevailing sentiment amongst individuals or small business webmasters is generally something along the lines of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". There's a good reason for this too. It can often be quite an ordeal to get a good site up and running in the first place - not something most people care to repeat. Especially if this undertaking was more than eight or nine years ago when many of today's super powerful web platform tools were still tricky-to-use and hard-to-learn little projects.

I myself created a website, based on osCommerce - I didn't know any better at the time. As it turns out, I ended up writing most of the code base myself. This is a huge problem for me because half the code is my own, and half the code is osCommerce which hasn't really moved on that much in the interim. For me, the war is over. And, I understand and sympathize with anyone else who is in the same boat.

What generally happens with websites like these is that in an attempt to keep them modern and up to date, we tack on bits of script and code every so often, building a veritable frankenstein under the hood. Sure, it works and it gets the job done, but it's never really satisfying because deep down, you know that it could do it's job a lot better with the technology that exists today.

This is the exception to the rule though:

Often migrating to a new platform is easier than you think. Remember that countless other people have most likely had to do the same thing (or very similar). There are all sorts of scripts available that can move your content from one platform to another. If your site is not content heavy and has a set number of pages then you really must upgrade.

I know, you're probably sitting back right now thinking how comfortable you are with your website as it is. You know how it works. So what if it takes a bit longer to post a new page, or if it takes a bit of tweaking in the code base to change images here and there? Well, fight that urge because what's out there now can make life a real pleasure.

I'm thinking of platforms that are developed with social integration in mind. It's a cinch to hook up your site to facebook and twitter and linked in. It's a breeze to include video and other media from all the big and popular sites. It uses AJAX to allow for lightning fast administration. New sites can simply do more things more efficiently. They harness the power of new technologies better - HTML5 is on the way remember.

Whatever work you put in now, will save you minutes and hours each day stretching off into the future. Remember too that upgrading and migrating to a new platform makes it easier to upgrade and keep with the times in the future because modern platforms know that they have to adapt to survive so they make it easy to jump from one version to the next.

Site prebuilder is keenly awaiting the final release of Drupal 7 so that we can upgrade all our distributions to this new platform. It's a beauty to work with... trust me.