I would also like to make the point that if one of the reasons your site is not being regularly updated is because you have to get your web company to do it for you, or your staff find it difficult to use the CMS behind your site – then it is time for a change.

Get training for your staff

or

Have your site shifted to a user friendly CMS (Joomla is one good option to check out).

Don’t let the construction of your site stop you from keeping it fresh.

Ten more reasons to update your website content.

Some reasons to add to the existing list.

1. A good website should be dynamic. And that means plenty of new stuff, and plenty of interaction – make this a place readers WANT to return to.
2. Your site content, perhaps especially your home page, should always look fresh and relevant. Dated material is obvious to readers very quickly.
3. Good intentions are not enough! Starting off adding new material (with dates on it, like press releases or newsletters) is only a good idea if you keep it going. Seeing a site with the most recent release or newsletter dating back to the previous year, or even earlier is NOT a good look.
4. Your products and services are constantly changing, and your site needs to reflect that. Even when you are super busy, make sure it is someone’s role in the company to be updating what’s new on your site.
5. Relevant social media “conversations”. Fresh, interesting content on your site gives you something to talk about in the world of Facebook (business and fan pages), Twitter, LinkedIn and anywhere else you and your audiences like to hang out and share.
6. Keep your business on its toes. If you don’t have new and interesting things to share with the world via your website – why not? Have you stopped growing, researching, developing, responding, innovating? Is your business in a rut – or does it just look that way?
7. The world around you is changing – fast, even if you’re not. Make sure you regularly check the language on your site to make sure it is still relevant to your audiences. Perhaps your audience has changed, but the jargon or terminology on your site hasn’t. Running a regular check for your key audiences is a great way to help ensure you stay in touch.
8. Communication is a constantly evolving process. And that’s what your website is – a primary communication tool. Don’t forget that.
9. Refresh your window display. If you were a retailer, how often would you change your window display? Once a week, once a month, every season? Change your site frontage just as often. Show the passers-by that this shop window is loved and attended to.
10. Reflect your marketing activities. If you are actively marketing online, make sure your site is perfectly tuned to your marketing campaigns. Create special landing pages for your adwords to get the flow going with potential customers who are interested enough to click through to your site – reward their interest by taking the time to give them what they are looking for. Don’t assume that what is already on the page is enough.

Would love your own comments about why you think a site should – or should not, be updated.

Till next time

Karen

1. Put your audience first – what will they be looking for on your site? What will turn them on, and keep them there to read all the good stuff and maybe even purchase your products or services … and what will scream out at them to just click right off the site.
2. Use the tools at your disposal. There are many free tools to analyse how people are interacting with your website and most of them are free. Make sure you install Google analytics at the very least, and learn how to use it. This is powerful information that too many people ignore.
3. Keep your sentences short and sweet. People will be scanning the page, so they need to get the sense of what you are saying quickly. Avoid long, complex sentences – attention will be quickly lost. 
4. Review your site content as if you had ADHD. Flick your eyes over the page. Do your main messages stand out? Are your calls to action obvious and compelling? Do you immediately understand what the page is about and what you are expected to do from here?
5. Make things clickable. People expect everything on a web page to be clickable – headings, pictures, anything that5 looks like a button, logos. So don’t disappoint. Make them clickable, link them to relevant places, AND, use alt text so when they mouse over your links, they can see what they are.
6. On that note, avoid using Flash. Sure Flash animations can look great, but they are pretty much invisible to the search bots.
7. Keep your best stuff above the fold. All the user research shows that many people will not scroll down the page. So never put your most important calls to action at the bottom, below the fold. Never.
8. Make sure you use some keywords on the page. Don’t “stuff” unnecessary keywords into the headings and text, but DO make sure there are sufficient relevant words on the page to be recognised by a search engine. You would be surprised by the number of sites that just have something like a product name and product photograph on the page – and no searchable text.
9. Make sure text is text, not an image. Don’t make the mistake of using a graphic designer who puts all the fancy fonts etc into an image – which looks great on the page, but can’t be reviewed by the search engines. You may have to sacrifice a little of the designer-ness, to help your site be found. And after all, there is no point having a fancy looking site if no-one but you ever sees it, right?
10. Get second, third and fourth opinions. Test your site for usability and to see if your messages are getting across. Don’t just ask people who will say that it is great, even if it’s not. Ask your target audience, your customers, for their opinions, and be prepared to make changes if what they say makes sense.

There you go, a great little guide to awesome web content. If you do all of those ten things, you are way ahead of about 60 – 70% of the sites currently out there. Of course there are plenty more things you can do once you get all of this right, but this list is a great place to start.

Karen

When you are creating a website you want people to come back to over and over again … and a site you want people to recommend to others, it is important that it has depth and  flavour.

The interwebs are full of vanilla sites that are little more than online brochures, they have no depth, no personality – no real reason for people to want to come back again.

Talking to a client today, I was suggesting that to really build loyal followers and increase visitors to their site, it needs to have more personality, and more insider information than something as relatively flavourless as a wikipedia page.

Sure wiki is a great resource, but how often do you refer to the same wikipedia page more than once?

No personality resides there, and you really don’t expect much in the way of fresh information to be added on a regular basis.

For your site to really draw the traffic, make sure it is fresh and flavourful, with plenty of zing to it!

(Next post, how to add some zing.)

Enjoy!

Karen

fresh green

Sometimes we need to state what to many might seem like the screamingly obvious – your website is NOT a brochure. Please don’t just “set and forget” and expect it to provide any kind of return on the investment you have placed in getting it up and running.

Fresh is definitely best – best for your readers – old and new, and best for those lovely search engines who are constantly seeking out new material.

So the five reasons to update your site right now?

1) To show the world you are alive! First and foremost, people want to know what is going on with you and your website is your shopfront, your window to the world. If nothing is happening on your site, and nothing ever changes, then viewers might just infer that you are not updating anything because nothing is happening in your business (or if it’s a blog, your life) – you have nothing new to say. In reality, you might be way too busy to update your site – if that’s the case, please make the effort to just freshen it in the obvious places on a regular basis.

2) They won’t come back. If people make the effort to come back a few times to see what is up with you, and nothing is different, then chances are they won’t bother coming back again – so you’ve lost them.

3) You’ll lose business to your competition. If they see nothing happening on your site, visitors might also conclude that perhaps you are no longer in business, and if they are potential customers wanting to buy a product, or comission your services, then they are very likely to move on to your competition.

4) Not updating content that is obviously out of date makes your company look incompetent. Is that the perception you want the market to have of you?

5) The search engines will start downgrading your site if there is nothing new being uploaded, particularly if your competitors with the same keywords are keeping their sites fresh and relevant.

Please remember to treat your site as a constantly evolving, incredibly powerful tool – you really need to view it as something very different from every other piece of marketing collateral you have ever developed. It can be as dynamic, flexible, exciting, innovative and interactive as you want it to be – all you have to do is ask, the technology is at our fingertips like never before.

Looking forward to some juicy freshness from you now…

Karen

P.S. do you like my garden??

winter sea

So it would seem that the picture really is worth 1,000 words – and if it’s a cute one, then even better! My last picture post brought the most visits so far to my blog, which was very interesting and great illustration of my point about the power of images!

So I figured that this time I should include an image too – this one is from Takamatua, a bay on Banks Peninsula, New Zealand, about an hour’s drive from where I live. And yes, it has been coloured – there wasn’t really a marmalade sky.

And the point of this post? It’s all about perception.

Marketing people will tell you over and over again, “perception is reality” … so no matter what the actual reality is, that doesn’t matter … what matters is what people perceive that reality to be.

How does this affect your web content?

Well it’s all good for you if you have a new site and need to quickly build brand credibility, reputation etc. Because it is possible on the web to immediately present your business as an established organisation – or equally, you as someone with an existing reputation.

Look at the sites of the leading players in your market segment, and pay attention to the cues that indicate they are established and credible. These might be things like case studies and customer testimonials; a significant number of stories or press releases in their News pages;  a company profile that shows more than one person in the team – and gives some history to the business; a number of newsletters archived on the newsletter section; significant number of blog posts etc.

Now you might not be able to produce all of that overnight, but you can start to build up some material that will all go up on the site at once, but possibly with a variety of dates.

For example, you may have launched your business last year, but not got round to creating a web presence until 12 months later. At the time you started the business, you may not have put out any press releases – perhaps because you didn’t know how, or you didn’t think what you were doing was particularly newsworthy at the time. Or, you simply wanted to put a toe in the water before you started making a lot of noise about your business.

No matter what the reason, you can create a press release – that is purely for your site, which is dated from the time you launched your business. Then create additional releases for significant moments in the next 12 month period – so when your new website goes live, you have three or four releases up there, all dated chronologically.

The great thing about this approach is that you don’t have to worry about pitching these releases to your target media, you can write them specifically for your audience. Which means you can provide a more specialised type of information – designed for your audience, rather than the broader brush approach you would take for business media.

You can also optimise these releases for your target keywords, and incorporate links to other parts of your site, and to your sales conversion path, so they provide a great opportunity to improve your rankings and direct people into the most important parts of your website.

If you are not certain or confident about writing good press releases, there are plenty of online resources that will give you tips, like this for writing perfect press releases and this http://www.press-release-writing.com/newsletters/

So filling up your News page is a start to making your site look established and substantial - make sure it is rich with content, even if you have to create it retrospectively.

If you have a blog on your site, have at least five posts up in there before you reveal it to the world. Again, you can date them in sequence, so they give the impression you have been blogging for a while.

I think that’s enough for you to digest now – another post on building credibility further through your site content will follow soon.

à bientôt

Karen