5 Ways to Keep Your Website Working for You

June 26, 2010 | by Tanya Zimmerli | Posted in Web Content

In November last year, Krystee wrote a great post about maintaining a CMS-based website. The post focused on the technical aspects of maintaining your site – those that are most appropriately managed by your webmaster, IT department or resident technical guru. In this post, I will return to the concept of website maintenance but from a business-oriented perspective.

Creating, redesigning or otherwise upgrading your website is a time-intensive and costly endeavor. It is logical, therefore, that you want to make that investment work for you as long as possible. Unfortunately, without continued effort and proper planning, the quality of your site will degrade over time, and you will find that it is no longer living up to your business needs.

Companies that have successful websites proactively manage their websites to ensure that they continue to meet the organization's objectives. Here are 5 recommendations for maintaining the quality of your website and making it work for you long after your initial launch.

1 – Publish objectives for Your Website and Evaluate All Content and Changes Against Those Objectives

Your website is a business tool, and as such it needs to work for you. Clearly identify what you expect your website to do for your organization and publish those objectives to everyone involved in website maintenance.

Each modification to existing functionality or addition of content or functionality should fit into your objectives and, if possible, go further in promoting those objectives than what is already on your site.

2 – Identify a Website Owner

Assign someone in your organization to own the site and its objectives. This person will be responsible for ensuring that the quality of the website content and features is maintained and that the website objectives are being met.

Your website will often be the first impression your customers, clients, or partners have of your organization. The person with the role of website owner is entrusted with creating and maintaining that critical interface between you and your online audience. Give this person authority and accountability for the success of your website and allow adequate time and priority to the maintenance tasks for that person to be successful.

3 – Create a Maintenance Plan

Create a realistic plan for maintaining your site. This should include the technical tasks mentioned in "Don't Forget to Change the Oil" as well content- and interface-oriented tasks, including:

1. Schedules for adding and updating volatile/frequently changing content – Every site should have content that changes regularly. Make a plan for updates to these pieces of volatile content as well as blogs, press releases, events, and any social media channels you maintain.
2. Schedules for reviewing and updating all other content on the site – Each piece of content on the site should have a review timetable: some pieces may be reviewed monthly or quarterly, while others may only need to be reviewed annually.
3. A schedule for verifying links – There are a number of freely available, web-based checkers that can perform an automated check of all links on your site – there's no reason not to do it regularly. At Balance we use the W3C Link Checker.
4. Schedules for testing each piece of functionality on the site – Every broken or poorly functioning feature on your site reflects badly on your organization. Periodically check each feature, approaching it as if you've never tried it before. If you find errors or areas that need improvement, get them fixed quickly.
5. A strategy for reviewing comments or feedback related to your site – If you have a contact form or email address on your site, have a plan for collecting, analyzing, and reacting to that feedback.

4 – Publish a Style Guide

A significant benefit of a CMS-based website is that it decentralizes content maintenance and allows your in-house experts to present their knowledge directly. However, everyone has slight differences in language style, presentation, punctuation, and more.

To be its best, your site needs to speak with a single voice. Therefore, publish your standards to all writers and editors for your website. Make sure that everyone knows that you use "email" instead of "e-mail" or "website" instead of "web site"; that paragraphs should be no more than 3 sentences; that links should not use the words "click here"; and whatever other conventions your organization has. Include spelling, gramma,r and stylesheet standards in your style guide.

5 – Periodically Re-evaluate Your Website Objectives

Re-evaluate your website objectives periodically (semi-annually or annually) and decide if they are still work with your overall business objectives. If they don't, adjust them and then re-evaluate your website content and features in light of the new objectives.