Schedule your updates!
Keeping your small business website alive and valuable means that, as a business owner, you will need to continue to regularly feed your investment. Finding the extra time can be tough but with a little bit of planning and these helpful tips, your website will be well fed!
Monthly updates are a great starting point. Schedule a meeting with yourself (and anyone who will be helping you) for a specific day of each month. Go ahead and mark it in your agenda! Give yourself a few hours so that you can do a brief evaluation of your website’s current status and still have plenty of time to write about recent events, which could include:
If you are really enthusiastic, you can also devote an hour or two per week to updates. Just schedule yourself for a meeting and be sure to show up on time.
If your business is already using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or YouTube, you can set your website up to automatically display your social media content by using feeds. That way you can update your content in one place, without wasting time logging in, copying, pasting, rewriting, etc. Depending on your website configuration, this is usually achieved by using plugins, embed code or doing some simple custom programming. The reverse is also true. If your website has a RSS feed, then some social media sites can use this feed to display your website updates.
Get other people to write about your business! Ask for testimonials from your customers. You can create a testimonials section on your website that clients can fill out and publish. Or you can ask for comments via Facebook or even BuyAlaska.com (if you’re an Alaskan business owner).
Sometimes, a little help is all it takes to get things done. A web professional can post new photos, add updates to your website, maintain Facebook and Twitter accounts and even generate fresh, new content. Not to mention make regular backups of your site and make sure that the files are up-to-date with the latest security fixes.
I hope you’ve found this article useful. Check out our other article for more info on the life span of a website.
These days, it’s not enough to just have a website.
Get the most out of your investment.
You have to use it. This means that once you’ve labored over choosing the right domain name, designing the perfect graphics and pulling your teeth out to write intro, about us and services pages, you are far from done. Once you launch a website, it’s like bringing a new life into the world. It must be given plenty of care and attention in order for it to do its job well. Like any worthwhile investment, you gotta keep an eye on it.
An abandoned website is a forgotten investment.
If your website hasn’t been updated or promoted in the last two months then it’s abandoned!
Why does this matter? Well, for starts, search engines like Google and Yahoo look down on abandoned websites. They can tell when a website has been updated and will give you more “points” for it. They can also tell when your website is being promoted through other websites or social media like Facebook and YouTube, for which they will give you even more “points” for. The more points you get, the higher up your website will appear in search engine searches for words related to your business, which greatly increases your visibility. More visibility is a good thing!
Secondly, if you’re not regularly promoting your business and its website on social networks then you are missing out on a great new opportunity to increase your visibility. Depending on the network, you can post videos or photos of your work, promote services through specials, take polls, create networks of people (read: potential customers)… and lead people to visit your website’s portfolio or online store.
Basically, if you’re not giving your website attention, then you’re losing out on potential customers and profits. A lot of Alaskan small businesses could greatly benefit simply by putting a few hours a month into reviving and utilizing their nicely designed websites!
With this in mind, we’ve devised a simple four-step vision of the life of a healthy, profitable website:
The gestation phase. Planning, design, construction and launch.
Real-life and virtual marketing. Social networking. Signing up with online directories, like Alaska’s own BuyAlaska.com.
Add new content (text, photos, videos, testamonials, etc). Promote new content.
Incorporate new ideas and technologies to keep your website fresh!
We hope this article has helped redefine your ideas of what a website is. Stay tuned in the following weeks as we explore the life span of a website in more detail. Thanks for reading!
When planning a web development project, it’s important to start with a thorough needs analysis. The more clearly you understand your needs and goals, the easier it will be to build an effective website that meets those needs. To help you get oriented through this sticky first phase, we’ve compiled the following list of questions:
