Like many small developers, I built a number of websites between 1998 and 2002 using the then standard approach of hand-coded HTML and, later, a web editing program. Then, there were a number of sites created between 2002 and 2005, built on amassed HTML knowledge and reflecting my earliest flirtation with with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), when no one knew if that “new” approach would catch on or ever be supported by browsers.

These older sites are interesting in that if you use “View Source,” you can track the progression of the technology behind how used to work. Other than their timeline value (questionable!), they are beginning to show their age. Perhaps archaic and obsolete are more apt descriptors of their functionality as viewed through a 21st century lens.

Some of these sites have benefited from regular content updates over the years, and others have been completely redesigned since their earliest versions. Then there are those clients who proudly display 14-year-old sites which they’ve never changed (go figure) since the original site files were ftp’d to the host’s server. For ALL of these, an overhaul of the back end is way overdue.

Whether table-based or rife with other deprecated (or soon to be) tags, these sites should all be updated and be completely modernized using CSS. In particular, if your client’s site is a teenager now, you should help him prepare a budget for an update (kind of like paying for orthodontia, but maybe not as expensive).

If you haven’t been providing web design for long, you won’t have this problem, UNTIL a new client asks you for a site update or redesign of his older site, and you discover that you’re going to have to start from scratch. Hence, you have what seems like an ethical conundrum.

Let’s say your client is basically happy with the way her site looks, but you know better. How do you persuade her that the parts she can’t see, and that she knows nothing about, need to be changed without sounding like an smarmy snake oil vendor?! Not only that, how to explain to the client that it’s not simply a matter of taking her 250 pages of HTML and changing it all out in just a couple of hours’ time.

Have you devised a successful strategy for explaining that your original technology was “best practice” way back when, but no longer technically viable, and that you will need to charge them to bring it up-to-speed?