Web Modernization for Developers: Strategies for Scalable Design

Keeping your website up to date is about more than appearance. In sectors with special requirements, regular modernization helps your site keep up with changing compliance expectations and security challenges while also ensuring your users’ expectations for accessibility and device compatibility are met.

At Palantir, we spend a lot of our time in the public sector: we’ve partnered with government, healthcare, and higher education institutions to build secure, scalable websites that meet their users’ complex needs. We know how important it is to keep your website updated, up to code, and usable while balancing budgetary and performance concerns.

What is web modernization?

First and foremost, your website has to work. Your users should be able to experience your site without devoting any effort to navigating roadblocks resulting from your regulatory compliance or security measures. Building an update habit helps ensure your user experience is as smoothly functional as your security.

It’s a practice, not a product. Modernizing a website is iterative: rather than bringing it up to new standards once, constantly improve and update your strategies. The tools and techniques we offer here are both current and future-focused. We know that expectations will continue to change over time as new technology, best practices, and user expectations emerge.

With each iteration, your site will likely encounter additional challenges—and existing ones, as you usually face pressure to make the most of the costs you’ve already spent. Legacy systems embody sunken costs that make for difficult decisions when evaluating new tools. In-house expertise that influenced earlier purchasing and design decisions might now limit awareness of options and responsibilities. And implementing new compliance protocols will almost always require an investment in educating your team and establishing new workflow elements.

Balancing your need for new approaches with ongoing operational costs and systems is complex, but choosing the right mix of new technologies and approaches will result in a compliant, accessible site that takes advantage of emerging technologies and tools.

What modernization means

In addition to an attractive appearance that invites users in, a modern website leads to greater:

• Inclusivity: revising your site with an eye toward accessibility and compliance helps more kinds of users interact with your site—and helps you avoid potential legal entanglements
• Efficiency: optimizing your code and fine-tuning your frameworks improve your server performance, meaning less load time and happier users
• Adaptability: as mobile devices become more popular, design has moved toward a consistent experience across tools—which has also led to an emphasis on intuitive navigation and websites that work to put users in the driver’s seat
• Scalability: as content management systems (CMS) improve performance, all sizes of sites become easier to update and adjust 
• Security: updating platforms and plugins reduces the risk of data breaches as vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated in newer versions

All these upgrades are rooted in a regular re-examination of your code and your client: understanding your users’ needs is the foundation of a successful and functional site, so researching those needs, testing your adjustments, and reiterating as necessary are all part of a robust modernization approach.

Strategies for secure, accessible sites

Building a successful site begins with choosing the right path forward for your team. Do you start by rehosting your site? Re-platforming it? Rebuilding it from the ground up? Each approach has its costs and benefits—and every situation has its own best answer, but there are common factors to consider as you look to a future that allows you to continue to adapt.

Regardless of your sector, your users must trust that accessing your site won’t compromise their digital security. While an older architecture isn’t necessarily a risk in its own right, updating your technology stack can help ensure you’re up to current standards—and improve user experience and accessibility.

Some sectors require compliance with accessibility standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA); these offer clear checklists of compliance assessments. For the rest of us, these guidelines offer similar benefits for ensuring our users can interact with our sites regardless of their personal circumstances. Turning to experts like Palantir can help ensure you’re implementing accessibility best practices without wading through complex legal documents.

While we work with Drupal, an open source platform that prioritizes both safety and accessibility, generally, Agile practices can help to minimize risks for both. Iterative updates allow you to assess current experiences and vulnerabilities to deploy adjustments with minimal site disruption.

Open source solutions

In addition to foregrounding security as users contribute their own identification and adjustments to vulnerabilities, choosing an open source platform like Drupal gives you a head start on other modernization benefits. Open source platforms are regularly updated on both small and large scales: code contributors offer tailored, discrete tools, and larger CMS updates allow for structural overhauls that adapt existing builds.

Using open source also mitigates ongoing costs that might hamper your modernization efforts in future iterations. Because these solutions are community-supported and customizable, your team can control modernization costs by deploying precise adjustments and modular iterations that address specific concerns—and open code means you also avoid ongoing licensing costs built into proprietary options.

A collaborative approach, in fact, is a strong cornerstone of a modernization strategy. Building robust documentation systems helps establish internal knowledge transfer so your team can more quickly assess what your website needs. When an outside expert is needed, turning to an established public-sector partner like Palantir means you reap the full benefit of best-practice modernization management and intricate industry expertise. Our Continuous Delivery Portfolio, for example, offers a proactive approach to an iterative Drupal deployment.

Looking forward

As you decide which modernization model to adopt, the first step is evaluating your current web strategy and identifying one or two places to start. After all, an iterative process doesn’t have to happen all at once. If you’re ready for an outside, fresh observer, Palantir is your partner for this project. Get in touch for help setting your next priorities.