Updating your website - the whys, whens and hows

Although it seems onerous to have our cars regularly maintained, and often feels like an expense we could well do without, we all know that having our cars well looked after improves performance, enhances efficiency and helps preserve their value.  And we look cooler when they’re nice and shiny!

The same applies for websites. 

Why update your website?

• To attract visitors: A refreshed site with new content will keep visitors engaged and returning .  Websites which evolve and routinely include new or different information will portray your business as successful and progressive.
• To update your products and services:  Particularly impactful where these new features are in response to customer feedback, best sellers or changes in your marketplace.
• To improve your Search Engine rankings:  Search engines want to provide the best results for their visitors and give higher rankings to sites which are regularly updated.
• To ensure that your website is working well:  It is important to make sure that the technical aspects of your site remain functioning, up-to-date and intact.  Keeping an eye on links, monitoring activity via analytics and verifying that any references to external sites are still valid ensures a more successful visitor experience and keeps your site professional and convincing.

The design aspect of your site should not be ignored.  You have invested in a brand identity which is familiar to your visitors.  Unless your business has completely changed, it is probably wise to only make moderate changes to design – tweaks in layout, style, content and colour – on a regular basis.  You need to portray consistency and confidence. That’s not to say that a complete redesign shouldn’t be considered.  Like all things, web design follows its own fashion dictates, and a site which was contemporary 2 or 3 years ago may well now look tired.

When should you update your website?

There are no hard and fast rules about the frequency of updates, but most Search Engine Optimisation experts recommend that you update your site at least four times a year.  This gives the search engines new content to find when they crawl your site and of course keeps things interesting for your customers.

It's useful to look at your competitors sites and compare them to yours.  If their sites look and perform better its definitely time for an update.

How do you update your website?

There are two ways of maintaining your website – via a Content Management System (CMS) or on an ad-hoc basis via your web designer.

If you have a large site, e-commerce business or ever evolving product or information set and need to update content regularly, then CMS is the answer for you. 

Our bespoke CMS enables you to undertake any amendments in-house without the need for coding or programming knowledge. The CMS will allow you to update content on all pages as well as adding new pages in the site via a password protected web accessible admin interface and an MS Word style text editor.

The text editor is very powerful and allows inserting of images, links, documents etc. plus full formatting of text, all without knowledge of html code.

If your site is smaller and only needs intermittent updating, it may be more cost efficient to provide those updates directly to your web designer for ad-hoc inclusion.  And of course, should the business dictate that these updates are becoming more frequent, the nature of the web means that we can create your own CMS for you later should that be appropriate.

Don’t forget,  a fresh and up-to-date website:

• keeps visitors interested and coming back
• keeps search engines interested and enhances your rankings
• helps your business maximize its web ROI.
• Is one of the most powerful business tools you have.

Contact us today