Is your website up to date?

Your business or organization continues to grow, develop and change over time.

You add new services or products, you may change your location, have news of a new event or something that has happened. Is your website reflecting your CURRENT situation? or is it showing old and outdated information and is not accurately reflecting you?

Perhaps the information on the website is WRONG and you are losing opportunities with new contacts or current clients and customers that may visit the site.

During the phase when you designed your website you or one of your employees was very focused on what the website said.  However it is very common that after the site is launched your attention may have turned elsewhere and you never actually take a look at your website.  Maybe you check your visitor statistics or check how you are doing in the search engines — but when is the last time you actually LOOKED at your website.

One way to do this is go to your website URL and think of your self as the type of person that would be visiting it for the first time.  What would you be looking for? Is it easy to find it?  What are the ACTION items?  Can you sign up for a newsletter or contact the organization easily?  Make a note of the information that you had questions about or would have a problem with as a visitor

Then put on your owner or manager hat — as you go through the site.  Is it accurate and up to date in the different sections?  Check the ABOUT section, products and services, upcoming and past events, bios or descriptions of people, contact information, picture galleries etc.  Your site might not have all of these and it might have other sections and pages.   Make a LIST of pages that need to be updated.  Make a list of the content that needs to be CHANGED and the content that needs to be DELETED and the content that must be ADDED.

Content management is really a 2 step process.  The owner / manager / marketing person is responsible for identifying the actual content – text, links, photos, videos.  Then either you communicate this information to your website person, or your internet partner who manages your website, or you do the updates yourself.  Assign one person, or put it on your “to do list” to review your website once a month.

Aleph Consulting is announcing a new “Content Management Service” (CMS) that will enable you to update the website yourself with little technical expertise.  If you can use MS Word or other word processing software you will be able to do the edits yourself and see the updates on the website immediately as you review.

This service is due to launch on March 5, 2010.  If you would like more information about this please contact me davies@alephinc.com