Maintaining projects long-term
Paul Romantsev
Manager
Building a modern website that keeps up with all the trends, while being maintainable in a long run, is not an easy challenge. No surprises here. You can make use of the latest technologies, implement best practices and built a piece of art. But let it rest for few months without constant support, and it will require a ton of heavy-lifting from the developers to make it shine again.
As time passes, multiple problems emerge: design looks outdated, underlying technologies are now considered bad practice, hosting provider deprecates the language version that fuels your site, which makes further updates impossible. The list can go on.
Over the years of working with numerous companies we found a way to build sustainable projects using proven methods of keeping things up-to-date long-term.
Headless CMS
You might have heard a lot of bad things about pre-made content management systems. Complexity, vulnerability, low performance, lack of customization are only a few of them.
Let's take WordPress as an example - the platform that powers more than 40% of all websites as of 2024. A bunch of vulnerabilities, related to popular plugins, are reported daily, including the critical ones. And not all of them can be fixed by a simple update. Speaking of plugins, which are the crucial part of WordPress development. While they simplify the building process, they are often the main source of complexity and performance degradation.
So-called headless CMS are way better in that matter. They let developers build a complex data structures without spending a ton of time re-inventing the wheel. Additionally they don't limit you with the pre-made choice of the technology: you can use the same source of data for your website, mobile app and even social media account.
Furthermore, you don't need you own server to support and deploy, initial setup takes no time, and you often get an access to built-in content delivery network for your media, which takes one more task from your plate.
Another thing you won't have to worry about is vulnerability. SaaS-companies often have strong security teams that make sure your data is safe and protected. Huge deal for a business on any level.
Out clients have an amazing experience with tools like Prismic 
and Contentful in the long run. They cover all their content update themselves in an easy and straightforward manner without involving developers, which saves costs and time.
Projects templates
While each and every project we've worked on over the years is unique, they all still have a lot of things in common from the technological perspective. That's why we've managed to unify all of them to some extent. And the tool we've used for that is projen .
This live template engine extensively used by AWS community is a tricky pony, but we've managed to incorporate it in our development flow so that we have a perfectly crafted template to spin up a new project fast, regardless of whether it's a website built with Next.js, Infrastructure as Code app or toolbox for automated tests.
In comparison to similar solutions, projen relies on a single configuration file for the whole project structure. This approach allows to introduce new features, fix bugs and keep packages up-to-date simultaneously in all projects, that were created from the same parent projen template without the risk of breaking anything. It’s not a set of static files, but rather a live configuration, that evolves over time. Massive benefit for websites with long-term support.
Design system
Essentially, the design system is a curated collection of components and standards, that are used to build and scale various digital products, while keeping them consistent regardless of the platform.
Design systems became a huge thing for the last few years and for a number of reasons. With a design system in place you can be sure that the design language is consistent across applications, whether it's a website, mobile app or marketing materials.
If your design system is well-thought, it also makes it easier to scale your product almost Indefinitely, since you already have all the building blocks to use.
Making sure your design is looking fresh is also a breeze with a proper design system. Improving visual presentation can take way less effort if all the pieces play well together.
But this comes with cost: building design systems require a lot of expertise and time. You could make use of existing design system - a ton of pre-made ones already exist, both free and paid. But pre-made design system will lack the most crucial part - your brand identity. And your clients will see it.
We've built and implemented design systems for our clients, polishing this craft on the go. While it's still a heavy-lifting, with the currently established approach we manage to build it fast and effectively, making sure you get all the benefits without spending a fortune.
In conclusion
Long-term support is way more complex than a sum of the points mentioned above - it's something we're constantly improving to make sure our clients' projects stay up-to-date for the years to come. But relying on tested and proven methods helps us to be consistent with the quality