Keep Your Website Current

An often overlooked aspect of a website is that it needs to be maintained.  Setting and forgetting is not a great strategy for your site.  The primary reason for this is that things change.  If you don’t keep your site current then it will not have no ability, or a hindered ability, to market your products or services.

Here is a list of things that change and efforts need to be made to keep up with it.

• Content changes: There’s nothing worse than a website with a lot of information that is outdated.  That’s especially true if contact information is inaccurate.
• Technology changes: The internet does a pretty good job of supporting older technologies but it doesn’t last forever.  It’s important to check on your site, especially any tools or programming to ensure it’s functioning properly.
• Layout changes: Technology often breeds change in design.  You don’t have to be a cutting edge site but a critical eye is necessary if your site layout is dated.  Even untrained eyes can pick out dated sites that were clearly designed a decade or more ago.
• Link changes:  Link internally to your site should be stable but what about links going to other sites?  It’s good to check those links intermittently as they can break at any time.  This is especially true for older blog or article posts that often are neglected.

So how does one keep up with changes?  Many folks don’t have time or a focus on their website to remember everything that might need updated in real time.  The simplest way is to create a maintenance matrix.  This is a schedule of what items need reviewed and when.  Setting a matrix often keeps the workload down because it dedicates certain times to updates.  Critical changes like contact information updates need done immediately but other updates for basic sites might be as infrequent as a yearly review.

Set a schedule to keep your site current.  All it takes is a schedule and some diligence and you will have a site serving visitors content that’s applicable for no, rather than the past.