We all know about the necessity of maintenance when it concerns our cars, houses and health, the same is true with your web site. The success of any web venture will rely on the amount of attention and maintenance that is put into it. A regularly updated website means you get the maximum return on your online investment.
Four Reasons Why Regular Web Maintenance is Important
- To keep visitors interested
As customers become familiar with your site they will see you as a trustworthy supplier and are more likely to send their business your way. Fresh material added regularly to your site keeps visitors coming back to see what’s new. Routinely feature creative new content, text, graphics or images, to build the traffic of repeat visitors. - To add new products, services or features
Evolving your web site based on customer feedback means it’s more likely to attract your best customers. - To maintain your Google rankings
Google gives higher rankings to web sites that are updated regularly because hey want to present the best quality content to their customers. - To keep your website working well
When your web site is well maintained links to external web sites will continue to work, images load and emails function. This means customers can find what they are looking for quickly and easily and are more likely to buy from you.
Maintaining Your Site
Maintenance for a small site may take as little as a couple of hours a month. A large site could be a few hours per week to maintain. Whether large or small, a Professional website development company such as Anyware Ltd has a variety of resources to help you get the best from your website. Get their expert opinion on the best way to manage your web site. For small, irregular changes it’s probably cheaper and more convenient to ask your web designer to apply changes for you.
For regular changes you will probably want a simple system that allows you to update the areas of your web site you need to change (like FAQs or testimonials), and doesn’t allow you to break areas you don’t need to change (like visual layout and enquiry forms). Anyware’s Content Manager is an example of a system that’s been design for non technical business people to update only what they need to change and it does not require a degree to operate.
Checklist for your website copy
When updating your web site you need to connect with your customers. Good website text will have the following features; does this apply to your website text?
- First person: to connect with your readers use "I", "we" and "you".
- Up to Date: Update the content frequently.
- Spelling and grammar: No errors, use spell check.
- Paragraphs: Primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.
- Lists: Both bulleted and numbered form a large part of the text.
- Sentence length: Brief is best (10 words or fewer).
- Relevant text: The text contains key words related to your business, products and services so Google ranks your site well.
- Professional & friendly: overly formal language can be hard work to read.
How well did you score?