Everywhere you look there are books and entire magazines devoted to the process of building a website. But there aren’t any books about how to be an effective website owner. The “set it and forget it” mindset permeates business from the owner down to management, and leads to stale, out-of-date, websites that cause more harm than good.
Update Frequently
I’m constantly pressing the point about updating websites regularly. Part of being a website owner is taking responsibility for the information you are providing to people. Make sure the information is accurate, but beyond that make sure that your new products, specials, support notices, sales, and business news are also on the site. Providing that your business is not ready to close its doors tomorrow, there is a lot of stuff happening that should be reflected on your site.
Get Some Analytics
You may not understand everything you’re looking at, but you should know at least how many people are visiting your site. Without that basic baseline of information it can be hard to judge if your site is working, much less being found. So much of website content is guesswork. You, as the business owner, make a lot of assumptions about what your clients want to know. Analytics can give you a dose of reality by letting you see how many people are looking at specific content.
Hire Experts
Updating your website, understanding analytics, and writing copy may not be your specialty, and you may simply not have the time to do it. If you can’t manage to do these things hire someone professional to help you. If you’re not doing these things frequently and correctly, you’re wasting the investment of time and money that you put into the site.
Organize Your Information
Besides the special functionality your site may have (like blogs, content management and newsletter signups) you have to keep track of the basic information needed to access your site. Things like FTP, host phone number, domain registrar, passwords, and webmaster contact information have a tendency to get separated from each other. Down the line, this could lead to disastrous down time, or worse yet, loss of your domain ownership!
Get Your Website Organized
Download our FREE guide and you’ll always have the most important information about your website at your fingertips. Never again hunt through emails or scattered documents and notes to find your providers, passwords and other information. Get your website organized now.
About the author: Jeune Ortiz is VP of Marketing and Creative Director at future-ink. With more than 20 years of experience in graphic design and marketing, Jeune brings extensive knowledge and creativity to each website and internet marketing solution to grow your business.
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