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Web Design
Keeping
Your Website Current
  ow
that you have a well-organized, well-designed
site, your work is done right? Hardly. The biggest workload should be
still to come. You'll need to decide how often your site will be updated
and changed. A site that changes, evolves and grows ensures visitors that
the site is growing and is worthy of return visits. Here's a few things
to consider:
- Update your site often. It's a big turnoff to visit a site that offers
the latest in outdated information. The Web provides the opportunity
to communicate quickly with a worldwide audience. It can be a lot cheaper
than publishing a daily newspaper or weekly marketing materials. At
the same time, a website comes with a responsibility. Because it's so
accessible and cost-effective, viewers expect the information to be
as current as possible.
- Have a section where recent site changes are highlighted. This lets
people know that a site is being maintained and overseen. When new links
appear on other pages, you could add a special "New" graphic
next to them as well.
- Remove outdated pages and information as you go. If you keep up with
this stuff, and have your designer remove outdated information, it will
be a lot easier than if you let it build up over time. You'll save on
extra server storage charges for having extra files taking up space.
Also, people may bookmark certain pages in your site. If pages are outdated
and are still accessible, people can get to them through their bookmarks
or search engines. Why confuse or anger people with outdated information?
- Keep an eye on the structure of your site as you update it. Keep a
diagram of the site's pages and how they relate to each other. This
will allow you to tell if the focus of your site is shifting in a new
direction. This will also tell you if you need to rework your navigation
and organization of the site.
- Keep an eye on external links and have them checked often. Make sure
that they're still valid links. Your visitors will appreciate this attention
to detail.
- Keep an eye on traffic and your server's capabilities. This can be
done by accessing the site at different times and on different days.
Your server host should also be able to supply you with detailed reports.
Is your server being maxed out at certain times of the day? Should you
take steps to increase the number of visitors your site can handle?
- Check the search engines. Is your site being found as quickly as you
would like? If not, your designer can adjust your meta
tags which hold keywords and descriptions of your pages. Search
engines sometimes use these to gather information for a search. You
might also consider writing a page explaining what your company does.
This text could carefully use important key words repeatedly. Some search
engines search by looking at the content on a page rather than meta
tags.
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