The Importance of Servicing Your Website Every 3,000 Visitors

In the same way that you service your car with regular maintenance, you site needs to be serviced too. If you want it to work for you for years or even decades, you’ll have to constantly work on it. Stale sites are ineffective and may “break down,” just like a car with no maintenance. 

All sites need maintenance, from the most basic starter site to the biggest, most expensive one. A site is only as good its maintenance. Always remember that.

Fight the urge to assume that a site is done once it’s created. This is the mindset that will cause you to neglect your site. Always ask yourself if you’re maximizing your exposure and reaching your potential customers in the way that you want. Here are some other questions to ask yourself about your site.

Does it work? – No, we don’t mean if the site comes up when someone enters the URL. We mean is it doing what you want it to—getting sales? Do the images and text work together to urge viewers to buy? It could be that your text and images are actually driving customers away! No one wants that.  Sometimes, all it takes is changing a few quick words to make your site much more effective. One client we worked with (an insurance company) was able to get more customers just by changing the pictures from a single woman to a happy family. It was a small change that brought about a big result.

Is there anything new?– As time goes on, things change. Your content needs to reflect that. When you leave old information on the site for long periods of time, it makes it look like your business isn’t doing anything new. It also doesn’t showcase the new things you have going on. If you have any new services, products or special discounts, it should be shown on the site. Visitors should be able to see that you have new things happening. They need to be able to see your progression as a company.  The products or services you offered 5 years ago, for example, should be different from what you offer now. Your site should reflect that. Our content management system is an easy way to edit and update your content with no hassle. The best part is that it is included in the price of site development.

What else do you do?- Most companies have a main niches and then some other smaller niches. Don’t sell yourself short by not focusing on the smaller niches. Everything your company does and offers should be listed on your site. If it isn’t updated regularly, you may develop some new products or services and not make them available to your online customers. If a potential customer doesn’t pick you because they simply don’t want to, that is fine, but if  they don’t pick you because your site didn’t reflect all the accurate information, you’ve done yourself a disservice.

Are there new innovations? – In this day and age, things are changing rapidly. In the same way that the new cell phone you got today will be outdated tomorrow, online technology changes too. New ideas and methods are constantly developing, and your site should reflect this.  We discussed a few weeks ago the topic of “Using Facebook's 500 Million Users To Your Advantage.” One way to do that is by using their “like” and “comments” functions. Getting a lot of likes and comments on your business page is a great way to get your product or service to go viral. If you’re not up on your hip internet lingo, “go viral” means to spread rapidly across the Internet.

If you’d like to stunt the growth of your business, by all means, leave your site alone, but if you’d like it to grow and flourish, you must make updates a priority. You don’t want people to think you’ve fallen behind or to start to question if you’re still around. Haven’t you checked to see when a site was updated? You probably have. Other people do it. Let them know that your site has been.

Before you decide to update your site, first check to see if it is even worth it. Some sites are so old and out of date that it is better and easier to just start fresh with a whole new site. No point pouring money into something that just isn’t going to work.  If you are unsure about your site, we’d love to talk to you about the possibilities.

Farin Innovations – a Miami website design and website development company, is here to help you make the necessary website changes –be they big or small. We have been in the industry since 1999. Take a look at our portfolio to see some of the many success stories, http://www.farininnovations.com/portfolio.