Maintaining your website is very important for any business or organisation as it puts you ahead of the competition and ensures that the site is in sync with the business, it's product and services and the changing trends in the market.
Is Your Website Busy Marketing Your Business? - The internet has become the biggest marketing platform for businesses across nearly every industry sector. Whether you are a service provider with a global client base or you sell your products within a limited local area, a business website adds wings to your marketing efforts and campaigns. Merely launching a website won’t give you the edge over your rivals because all websites need to be maintained, updated and managed to perform at their very best and beat the competition.
You need to keep your website informative and keep it up to date with the changing trends in your industry. This is where many businesses loose out as their websites become dated and start loosing traction with their website visitors. Your website needs to have specific tasks to complete each day and you must ensure that it is helping you achieve your business goals. Let us take a look at a few simple ways in which you can manage your website effectively after you launch it.
Choose A CMS Diligently - Content Management Systems (CMS) have changed the way websites are created and managed. These incredible software packages allow users to alter the design and content in a website without any coding skills. Most CMS tools come with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors that work similar to text processing tools like Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat and help you to add and manage content on your website.
It's very important for any individual, business or organisation to choose their CMS tool quite carefully as all the CMS systems are quite different in their features and their easy of use. While the obvious choice would be to go for one of the many popular open source Content Management Systems, with each passing day these systems are getting more complex to run.
If you are in no need of many of the advanced features of a CMS then you could choose a niche CMS that is simpler and easier to use. Your web design agency will be able to advise you on what CMS system would suit you best today and over the coming 5-10 years.
Get Trained on The CMS Tool - There are scenarios where different departments within a larger business would have to depend on the web team to publish a simple blog post on their website. Ideally you wouldn't have such a scenario as it not only stretches your web team but leads to delays in publishing simple posts or reacting to an emerging problem or opportunity in the market.
It is important for your company to train a few staff members on using the CMS. This allows the job of website updates to be carried out by a number of people, and removes the bottleneck from the website update experts or from one 'website friendly' person. It also covers your business if one or two staff members left the company or are on holidays or extended leave – website updates can still be carried out as they are needed.
Don’t Ignore SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - How often have you gone into the second or third page of Google or other search engines to find what you are looking for when searching for a product? Stats show that only 7% of Google searchers ever go to the second page and even less to subsequent pages. In a world where every business is trying to create a strong web presence, you will need to fight for a space on Google's page 1 for your industry keywords.
This is where Search Engine Optimisation becomes vital for branding and marketing your business online. When you choose a CMS tool make sure it has a built-in SEO component that allows you to optimise every single page on your website. It should allow you to optimise the Meta Data, URL, Title Tags, H1/H2/H3, Images and other SEO components on the site to make each page search engine friendly.
Not all CMS systems have an easy to use interface and SEO interface. For some CMS systems it's just a poorly tacked on add-on module. Talk to your web design company about what are the best SEO enabled CMS systems for your website.
Be Careful With Images - Images are one of the most important components of your web design as they make the website visually appealing. But you should be careful with the use of images as they can affect the performance of the website. Do not clutter the site with too many images as they can make it look amateur and also divert the attention of the users from the core idea.
High resolution images can severely slow down your website which could turn away your potential website visitors. There are a number of image optimisation tools that let you resize images and make them perfect for the web and also help you optimise them for search engines. Often a company with a new website will have a website full of perfectly sized images and the right volume of them per page - but all that work was done by a skilled web designer.
Then, the website owner starts adding content and that website fluency can be eroded with excessively large photos, badly chosen photos, poorly chosen photos, copyright protected photos and maybe even too many of them on some pages. Ask your web design company for advice when you're being trained on your CMS. Find out what is best practice now that you are going to be managing the photos and text on your website.
Find The Right Design Company - As you can clearly see maintaining a website requires skills, patience and lots of your precious time. If you are short of any of these you would be well advised to talk to your web designers to see how they could help. Maybe some additional training for your staff could help your business or perhaps you could get a well priced package from the web design company to do updates once a month for you.
A good web agency will be able to build you a website from scratch based on your exact needs and help you to make the right choice of CMS tools. They could also help you with content updates and site maintenance, and bring in some design changes as required. The fresh content updates to your website pages with will also improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) scores according to Google, Yahoo & Bing.
Launching a website is only half the job - to make full use of your website you need to maintain it regularly and keep it in sync with the changes that your target market wants to see on your website in terms of content, easy of use and visual appeal. If you have any website maintenance questions, feel free to give us a call or email and get them answered by a team of web experts.
