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New Year’s Website Resolutions: January Tune-Ups That Pay Off All Year

An agenda open on a desk with "Happy New Year!" written on the middle of the right page in black ink. A black pen sits next to the agenda.

A new year often encourages many of us to reflect and make some kind of positive change, whether it’s to exercise more regularly, give ourselves more time for that hobby, learn a new skill, or stick to just one coffee in the morning. The annual changeover is also a great time to revitalize your website with the same kind of review and care. These January tune-ups can help maintain your website and will pay off all year.

Maintaining Website Functionality

New year website maintenance is an excellent chance to ensure your website’s general functionality. You want to make sure your website works properly to give the best impression to potential clients and customers. A dysfunctional website could send the opposite message. Here are some simple but effective January tune-ups for to ensure your website’s functionality:

  • Pages and their assets load: Every webpage loading with all its assets is essential functionality. Ensuring pages, text, images, videos, etc. load correctly by browsing through each page is an excellent way to ensure functionality for the new year.
  • Keeping things speedy: Along with everything loading correctly on your website, everything should also load quickly. Websites that take longer to load easily lose their visitors and are deprioritized in search results. Google has an easy tool that can help you check your website’s speed. One effective way to reduce load times is to optimize your image sizes, since bigger images take longer to download.
  • Check for broken links: The internet is not as stable as we’d like to think. Links regularly change, meaning old hyperlinks may suddenly lead nowhere. These could be links leading to other pages on your site or those leading to other websites. The latter group are especially likely to become broken as other websites remove pages or redesign their page structure. These broken links could frustrate users trying to navigate your site or create the wrong impression. Various tools can help parse through your website to ensure links aren’t broken.

 

Tuning Accessibility

Besides maintaining and tuning up general functionality for the new year, you should also review your website’s accessibility. Web accessibility is a requirement for any business with more than 50 employees in Ontario, and also a best practice since it allows the most people to use your website. Website accessibility is also not a “one and done” process, because the standards are continuously being revised and updated. While expert web designers will be most familiar with these best practices, there are also some you can begin to review this January:

  • Good alt-text on every image: Alt-text helps those with difficulty seeing get a better sense of what is being displayed in an image or graphic. This is essential for users to fully grasp what a page might be communicating, because otherwise a screen reader simply reads the image’s file name. Every image should have alt-text that accurately and fully describes its content. For example, include all objects and quote any text and its placement in the image.
  • Accessible font-choice: You want to ensure your website’s font is readable for all users to ensure maximum accessibility. This includes considering both the type of font and its size.
  • Colourblind friendly: Colourblindness is quite common and so is a key concern in website accessibility. If a graphic uses reds and greens, it may be indiscernible to someone with red-green colour deficiency. Using tools that visualize colourblindess can help identify potential issues on the website.

Checking Your Website’s Security

Another important maintenance routine that will prevent headaches throughout 2026 is to ensure your website is secure. There are few simple checks to perform in January that will help keep pesky hackers and malicious software from breaching your site:

  • Update, Update, Update: Keep your website and all of its plug-ins up to date. Older versions can leave security vulnerabilities that will leave your website vulnerable.
  • reCAPTCHA: A particular plug-in we want to highlight is Google’s reCaptcha. This service helps to keep your website secure from bots that can destabilize your website.
  • Checking for HTTPS: It is best practice today that websites use the HTTPS protocol to keep their pages more secure for their users. Reviewing settings can help to ensure this is being done.

 

Content Review

Some other new year’s maintenance that can take more time and effort is a content review of your site. This takes more time because it means looking through all the information provided on your site. This review helps to ensure information is up to date, such as your address or services/products provided. It also helps to identify outdated or now irrelevant information which no longer applies and could confuse visitors. These updates also improve your website’s SEO, since search engines review when web pages were last updated.

January Tune-Ups Pay Off All Year

Now you should have a good sense of the simple January maintenance that will set you up for a smooth new year. Various plug-ins and tools can help you perform any of these tune-ups, although content review or a formal website audit will require some more specialized knowledge and input. Either way, Rosewood Marketing’s web team will happily review and implement these tools or more generally assist with website tune-ups. If you’re interested in more comprehensive maintenance or a complete audit, our team is ready and happy to help you fully prepare for 2026.

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Scalable by Design: Building a Website That Grows with You

Woman sitting outside leaning against a tree with a house in the background while she talks on the phone, pondering her website's scalable design

If you’re currently designing or redesigning your business’ website, you’re probably bogged down with a lot of decision-making and planning. One important strategy is to consider how your website will change as your business grows. This is why any business should build a website with a scalable design. That way, in a year or two from now, you won’t find yourself with another redesign and another whole swath of decisions and plans. We’ll explain what scalable design is and how you can ensure your business’ website is flexible for the future.

The Importance of Scalability

Designing a website is a costly endeavor in time, energy, and associated funds. That’s why you want to design a website with flexible functionality. A lot can change within a year or two for a business. Products, services, or content offered may double or even triple in that time. Each of these will require their own pages and media. The number of users may also steadily grow, demanding more on the hosting servers.

If a website has not been developed to easily scale, it will quickly experience growing pains. The website may become difficult to navigate, start to slow down, or even fail to load for users. This will mean a full redesign and the associated costs. However, building a website with growth in mind will allow the website to continue functioning optimally without needing an annual or biennial redesign. It also means all those new visitors won’t encounter a dysfunctional website that will damage the credibility of your business, but instead take comfort in the sleek user-experience they expected.

Website Scalability vs. Scale

Designing for scalability does not mean simply going overkill on your website’s resources, such as getting more servers or hosting resources right from the start. This is a difference between designing for scale and scalability. For example, it’s not efficient to pay for a scale of hosting services with resource limits designed to handle 1000 concurrent users, when the website averages a tenth of that. The same is true for data storage for your website. Scalability means ensuring these can be expanded when necessary. Thus, designing for scalability is efficient both in maintaining a design’s lifespan and in ROI.

Strategizing Scalability

Designing for scalability can be tricky. We can’t predict the future, and sometimes even the most reasoned anticipations fail. Nevertheless, there are many strategies and considerations that can help ensure a website will more easily grow for expanded functionality.

Scalable Website Structure

A website’s structure or the “sitemap” is a design’s backbone. It determines how pages are laid out. A logical and well-organized structure ensures that customers can more easily navigate around the website without getting lost. When designing this structure for scalability, consider how certain pages should be hierarchically organized. What are the overarching categories for the website, such as products, services, information, etc. How might these categories grow or need to be further subdivided? For example, there may be only a few individual products currently, but if those expand to ten, twenty, or even a hundred, the structure should be able to handle the addition of new categories so that navigation remains intuitive.

Scalable Features

A hierarchical organization is important for a website’s user experience and scalability. Just putting a list of 100 pages or products in front of a user will lead to confusion. Another scalability design tactic is considering features that can aid with scalability that help users narrow down material. For example, a filter function is excellent for scalable design. These use categories and tags assigned to products or pages to help users refine what they see. Just as you can design a scalable hierarchical website structure, you can design a scalable hierarchical set of filters which can also expand over time as more categories or tags need to be added.

Templates

It’s inevitable that a website will eventually add a new page or product. Designing that page from nothing takes considerable time. However, since websites are best made consistently, most product and content pages will be designed similar or even identical. This is why scalable designs use templates, and most web platforms offer templates such as WordPress and Shopify. These templates have a preset layout which allows a new page to be added much more quickly because the specific contents are put in place. For example, a product page template will only need the product and its details to generate the page according to the template. Uploading one, twenty, or two hundred products all at once will make no difference. These templates will have to be made when designing the website initially but will save far more time in the future.

Scalable Hosts

Another key decision when designing or redesigning for scalability is to pick a scalable web host. There are few things to consider when designing for scalability. First, look for a host that provides free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)/TLS (Transport Layer Security). These are essential for a website’s security. You will also want to look at the storage capacity provided at different plan tiers. Free hosting might provide ample storage space for now, but if your website surpasses that limit, how much will additional space cost? Similarly, check whether the host restricts the number of monthly visitors. Depending on your current website users and how fast it is growing, that also might limit how flexibly your website can scale.

The Scales of Flexible Design

Scalable web design may mean some more initial effort in a website’s design or redesign, but it saves much more time and resources in the future. It helps ensure an efficient and effective website for multiple years. Even with these key considerations we’ve discussed, there are other potential considerations for scalable and flexible web designs. If you’re curious about these other considerations, what web platforms or hosts would be suitable for your website, or want help in your new design, contact our web design team.

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The Impact of Typography on Website Readability and Branding

A pile of various keys used in typography, showing how hard it can be to pick the right font for your branding.

Fonts can easily be overlooked when it comes to web and branding. No one bats an eye at a suitable font, but the wrong font can get a lot of unwanted stares. As a result, the right typography is an important decision for a business’ website and branding. We’ll explain the impacts of typography, why font choice is important, and how you can start to pick the right font for your business.

Typography and Communication

Typography is an art dedicated to communication that is nearly a millennium old. In fact, some of the major fonts used today are age-old standards. Garamond dates to the 15th century, Baskerville is about 250 years old, Times New Roman was designed in 1931, and Helvetica (which you’re reading this in) at 67 is enjoying a surge in popularity. Some other standard fonts are more recent and date to the digital age such as Arial and Georgia, but the reason all of these fonts have become standard is because of their legibility and accessibility.

Why Pick a Font

While there are certainly a set of well-established favourites in typography, there’s still the task of choosing which is suitable for your business. This is an important decision because it guides the appearance and design of its website and all other forms of communication including social media, emails, ads, etc. Picking a single font for all of these is essential for building your brand’s consistency. That visual consistency in the same typography naturally increases a sense of trust for your business.

Furthermore, certain fonts also have associations and tones. It might seem odd that some text on a page or screen can cause certain emotional reactions, but some people respond negatively when they see something written in Comic Sans or Papyrus. You not only want to pick a font that allows your website and business to effectively and accessibly communicate, but also accurately reflects the character of your brand.

Font Readability Comes First

Of course, communication is a primary factor in all typography. You will want to pick a highly legible font for your branding. There are certain aspects that will help you consider the right typography for your website and branding.

Weight

A font’s weight refers to the thickness of its outlines. For example, a bold version of a font has a greater weight than the thin version. Most fonts offer multiple weights. This is beneficial because you can use the same typeface to visually organize information. For example, the Rosewood website is using bold weight for each heading along with a larger size for visual distinction from the medium regular text. Your website design should set out these typgraphy styles and your branding should outline which weight is appropriate where. Remember that thinner weights can be much harder to read.

Serif vs Slab Serif vs Sans-Serif

Serifs are the small lines attached to a letters’ large strokes in some fonts. Times New Roman and Georgia are two fonts with serifs. Slab serifs also have these strokes, but are thicker, such as Rockwell or Courier. Helvetica is an example of a sans-serif font, i.e. one without any extra strokes. These are also sometimes called grotesque fonts (referring to the time of their origin rather than an aesthetic judgment).

The argument about whether serif or sans fonts are more legible is still a matter of debate. However, the general rule is that those with full vision can read serif fonts faster, but sans-serif fonts are more legible for those with visual difficulties. As a result, sans-serif fonts are typically considered the more direct and accessible choice, slab-serifs are recognized for their modernity, while serif fonts have an air of sophistication or elegance.

Script and Decorative Fonts

Script fonts are those that imitate handwriting. Some of these are cursive, where the letters in a single word connect. While these might seem elegant or sophisticated, they are also less legible than typical fonts. Casual script fonts (e.g. Comic Sans) are a more recent development, imitating non-cursive handwriting. As a result, these typography have a non-serious tone and are rarely used by businesses in their official branding.

There are also famous decorative fonts such as Arnold Böcklin or Curlz. These are more often found in logos and titles. Decorative fonts have an impact, but they prize form over function. Keep in mind that highly decorative typography can be harder to read and undermine clarity. Therefore, use these sparingly for only a few words in a large size. They should never be your brand’s font for its usual typography.

Picking the Right Colour

Along with font, colour is a critical element of your brand’s typography and web design. While you will likely pick a primary colour that connects to your logo or other branding, you will want to pick a set of secondary colours. This ensures that you will have suitable colour contrast in all instances. For example, your business may have a blue logo and regularly use materials with white and purple backgrounds. While the same colour of blue will work for type on a white background, it will have much less contrast on the purple, especially those with colour deficiency. Pick a suitable set of colours that matches your branding while ensuring legibility.

Find Your Business’ Type

You should now have a sense of why picking the right font and typography for your website and branding is important. It’s a big decision now, but like the rest of your branding, picking that suitable font is something that should last for a long time and even multiple iterations of your website’s design for that trusted consistency. If you’re looking for further assistance in finding legible typography or finding a font that matches your branding’s character, be sure to contact Rosewood’s marketing team. Our web team will also be happy to help you update your website’s design with a new font or improve its accessibility.

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