It’s retro day here in my office. First, I was amused by the <MARQUEE> tag making an appearance in some code we outsourced to India. Take that, Web 2.0! Then, I got to update static HTML files that each contained the hard-coded navigation to the site. Granted, the site was “old” but so are server side include files.

I know this is likely all Greek to you, but I’m venting a little bit. I really don’t know why clients whose sites are this old haven’t been upsold into a new model. I wonder if this is a consequence of the “old” model of web firms designing, hosting, maintaining, et cetera: the firm can’t upsell the client on a new design because the client would rather pay the lesser service fee to have the old site maintained.

I suppose one solution is to raise fees for service to out-dated websites. In fact, at first blush, that seems like an ideal solution. You pick a date and tell your clients that after that date your fees double to service deprecated code. Then you offer then cheaper rates if they pay the one-time upgrade fee.

Another solution is something that I keep meaning to write more about: breaking the old model of web firm as host, maintainer and designer. I’ll have to get to that later.