I've spoken to so many people who really, really make life difficult for themselves by soldiering on bravely with poorly designed websites or a poor knowledge and understanding of their web platform. The reason, I think, so many people accept huge difficulties as part and parcel of building and maintaining a website is that they have not seen what it should be like. Accordingly, I want to highlight a brief (and in no way comprehensive) list of common, unnecessary difficulties - if you find yourself nodding at any stage during this article then it's likely you need to think about changing or upgrading your site.

One of the biggest issues that I've come across is adding new content (and managing or editing existing content). This may seem strange to people who use a good CMS or something similar, but many people struggle to add new pages to their website. If you have to do anything more than click a button to bring up an Add page form and type in the content, then you need to change your website. You should be able to add any number of different types of content with no additional work - regardless of whether its is a blog, a standard page, a job notice, a forum posting, a new product, whatever.

Often, features that are relatively commonplace end up requiring special development. For example, any good web platfrom should make it easy to search it's content. You should be able to control who has access to searches, what type of content should be indexed and included in searches and so on. If you are having to pay developers to implement this sort of functionality, then you need to change your website. Do some research on your requirements and almost inevitably you'll find that there is already a solution available.

Access control is another sticky issue. It should be easy for you to add content that is available to authenticated users and not the general public. In fact, it should be easy to distinguish between different types of authenticated users and allow some to read content but not to edit it, some to create it but not to delete it and so on. If you find that you struggle to control access to your website, then you need to change your website.

Reporting and logs are another big issue for many people. You should be able to easily determine what errors (if any) have occured recently, or find out the general status of a website, which are the most popular pages, whether a certain IP address been bombarding your site with requests, and so on. If you have no idea what is happening with your site at any given time, then you need to change your website.

Color scheme and other basic features should also be easily modified and manipulated without the need to delve into code (be it PHP, HTML or CSS). A good website should allow you to make changes through a sophisticated user interface. For example, changing and adding blocks of content should be controllable through a drag and drop interface without having to manually rewrite code. This is a big issue, so if you can't do this, then you need to change your website.

Any specialist functionality should also maintain the same high standard of useability as the rest of the site. If, for example, you are running an online store, it should be as easy to add new products or modify existing ones as it is to change any other bit of content. Operating an online store should be a case of managing lists of products and setting configurational parameters to govern things like tax, shipping, logistics and so on.

The general thrust of this article is that anytime you have to resort to working in code (barring a few basic exceptions) to complete a fairly standard task, or, find yourself spending ages having to do the same things over and over on different days, then it is likely that your website is not of sufficient quality to meet your needs.

Consider switching to a high quality, free Drupal site, or use a quality distribution based on Drupal. Speak to people in the know and get advice about it. Remember, we are now at the level where you can expect to have a world class website up and running on a hosted and supported server without lifting a finger or ever touching code.