Why your website is NOT finished

Redesigning or building a new website is an exciting prospect and one which many clients often become enthused to do. You’ve done the hard work, it’s all signed off and ready to go, your site is preparing to say hello to world wide web. Just upload and job done yeah? No! A website is never complete, it is never a finished product it is always an evolving and thriving, organic, living process that requires regular maintenance, tweaking and adjustments to encapsulate its “state of perfection”, or as close as possible.

Here are some of the key reasons why your website shouldn’t be shelved and not thought about again:

1. Content should be up-to-date. Business is always changing. New services, different hours, sales, additional staff, etc. Many changes that happen in your business need to be reflected in the content of your web site. Regular fresh content maintains readership and tells the search engines you are a regular ‘tweaker’ and your site is growing.
2. Content should be new and engaging. Beyond updates that reflect your offline business, your web site ideally should have some content that gets updated as a way to build your web site into your marketing plan. This could be as full-blown as a blog, but may just be a smaller “news” area, an articles library, etc.
3. Links become broken. If you link to a page from another web site, and that web site goes through a redesign, you may find that your link no longer goes to the original content. Therefore you need to regularly check your site for broken links.
4. Search Engine Optimisation is always changing. There are some universal best-practices for SEO, such as putting key words in your H1 tags, creating descriptive tags for your images, etc. But there are other areas of SEO that are constantly changing. SEO is crucial if you want to be found in the search engines, don’t overlook it.
5. Software upgrades. Depending on the technology (CMS) that is driving your site, you may need to upgrade software at times. Whenever you do an upgrade there is a small chance that something on your site will no longer work. You should budget for time to keep up with upgrades.
6. Technology changes. The technology available to build and view web sites is constantly changing, and improving. At the time you launch your site you have to make decisions about what are “best practices” today, knowing that those will change as technology changes.
7. Tastes change. Sometimes you look at a web site and just know it feels out of date. This is particularly the case where websites have been neglected but generally as styles and technology change and what users expect to see on the web change you too need to ensure your website is up to par with the competition or you’ll lose out. Keep checking the web for the latest designs and tech and a small regular budget to modify and enhance your website will pay its dividends as well as give your company an image that it is up with the latest trends, maybe even setting the trends if you are particularly creative.

Remember to always have a budget available to make amends and adjustments to your site to keep it evolving and it will return fruitful. Plan your time and stage the process of evolution for your website, regular goals and monitoring and analytics can give valuable feedback. Also listen to your users, offer feedback forms where they can give their opinions on how you are managing your website. Hopefully this article hasn’t put you off from developing your site more but instead inspired you to really get into the nitty gritty of site maintenance and design, you’ll find it quite fun and highly rewarding, I promise