3 Tips to Keep Your Site Content Fresh

Posted on 7 May 2009 | by Ryan Battles

Having a website professionally designed and marketed is only the beginning. An important and ongoing part of website ownership is the process of website maintenance. No matter what industry you are in, there will always be new information to be added, and old information to be updated or removed. If you are looking for ways to make your site's content fresh, consider these tips:

1. Go to your website as a visitor would, checking for any areas that may need to be updated. Put yourself in their shoes and run through a couple of scenarios. What would a customer who wants your phone number experience? What would a customer who wants to know more about your company experience? What about someone who wants to do business with you? If you have worked a lot with your website, you may need to ask someone else these things to get a fresh perspective.
2. Provide a method of feedback about the website. You could leave a message on the site that says, "Contact Webmaster," but people rarely do. You could have a feedback form on the website, but unless there is a motivation for filling it out, customers will probably ignore it. Well, I take that back, if your website is bad enough, you'll hear about it from your customers! Probably a more reasonable approach is to have a couple of questions about the website on a standard questionairre that you give to customers/clients/etc. However you chose to do it, getting feedback from others about your website will spark ideas for how to improve it
3. Implement a "latest news/events/etc." section that shows up around the site. Implement a box that throws up a random piece of text (like client testimonials). If you don't know how to do this, hire someone who does. This is an easy way to keep your site fresh with relatively little work. It also keeps you accountable. Nothing screams that a website is old like a last entry date of five years ago in the latest news section.

How you are going to maintain your website is a crucial question that must be asked before beginning any web project. Content management systems make it easy to update the back-end of a website, even without knowing any technical knowhow beyond what is required to send email and type Word documents. At Jovia Web Studio, we have discovered ExpressionEngine as our content management system of choice, because of its power, flexibility, and speed of development. Other options are out there. Make sure whoever helps you with your next web project knows the ins and outs of one of these pieces of web software, and how to maximize your ability to create fresh content after your site goes live.