Marketing for Small Businesses » What are you doing this week to update your website?

What are you doing this week to update your website?

How long has it been since you last updated your website? Here are 13 ideas and some ‘MUST DOs’:

Update your home page with a feature link to new site content.
Add information about new product or service offerings.
Check and update key staff profiles and contact details.
Add some useful and relevant industry or company news.
Answer some FAQs on a page/newsletter/blog post.
Integrate Google maps so clients can find you more easily. Type in your address in Google maps then click on the links button at top right (next to the print and send links) to find out how to do this.
Add links to your business social networking pages (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc).
Update product information and pictures, checking for a balance between text (more) and images (less).
Add a new resource, useful link and / or tip.
Check out all site links to make sure they are still working.
Search for and remove out of date information such as event announcements and newsletters.
Hypertext link your site pages to help guide site visitors to other relevant pages on your site.
Review or write page titles and meta descriptions; 70 characters for page titles and no more than 150 characters for your meta description.

Remember:

Make your content relevant. Write what your site visitors want to read. They are not going to bother wading through your site searching for relevant content – they’ll just go elsewhere.
Keep a back up of pages, content and images before you make changes to your site. I don’t need to spell out the consequences if you don’t and you need to reinstate something!
Optimise your images for the web before you add them to your site. Large images will be slow to load and will take up unnecessary server space. Resize them first to the size you want to use them on the site at 72 ppi (pixels per inch). Don’t forget to give them an ‘alt’ attribute too – that’s a short text description for search engines and text browsers.
Never assume what you see on your screen is what everyone else sees. Before you make your changes live, be sure to view them on different computers in different browsers. Check out current browser user statistics and view your own site statistics to see what the majority of your site visitors use to view your site.
Work within the current styles of your site. To keep your site consistent use existing styles for fonts, sub headings, text alignments, colours, etc that are used on other pages. A mix of different coloured fonts and alignments, text written in caps, etc will just looks amateurish.
Spell check – spell check – spell check! Poor spelling and grammar reflects badly on your business. Get someone else to check the copy before you make the changes live. I’ve seen a signwriter’s site selling ‘stationary design’, and an author’s site littered with errors… the list unfortunately goes on.

A website is never finished! There is always something you can do to improve its performance. If you set aside some time each week and tackle a few of these ideas on a regular basis you’ll be improving your site and working towards maximising its return on investment.