Building a site is just the beginning. Keeping it updated, fresh, and working like it’s supposed to is what ultimately allows you to do business on the web.

 

Consistently using the number of hours you have hired and paid Wowsers Web Design for is important for your business and your website.   Make your website work for you!

 

 Four Reasons Why Regular Web Maintenance is Important

(1) Fresh material added regularly to your site keeps visitors coming back to see what’s new. Some sites are constantly updated by the natural activity of their business, such as news, real estate, classified ads or online catalogs. However every site should routinely feature creative new content, text, graphics or images, to build the traffic of repeat visitors. Some sites add such features as scrolling news headlines, current time/temperature, discussion boards, or ad-your-own-link pages to stimulate a growing viewership. By all means, don’t limit your web to a static, stale presentation. Spending the time and resources to maintain freshness, usefulness and relevancy will reap a tremendous dividend.

(2) Websites must continually evolve and be refined to meet the increasing demands of your audience or client base, as well as reflect the progressing technologies and new browser versions.   As time goes by, you may see the usefulness of adding a search tool, automated forms, a mailing list database or other interactive functions.  You may discover better ways to organize your information or improve the usability of your site. You may also come up with more features to add which do nothing more than help provide some benefit to your visitors, which is a sure-fire way to build a rapport with future clients or customers.

(3) The success of your website is largely dependent on whether people can find your site using a search engine.  Google doesn’t use the meta keywords tag, but it does use keywords to help identify a web site’s relevance to a user’s search.   For example if your business is a dealing in Gift Baskets in Tucson Arizona. Most individuals would search for that product using the phrase “gift baskets Tucson.” That would be a phrase that we would have as one of the website keywords, and as part of the content.

The search engine looks for keywords in the page content, the URL, the title tag, and incoming links as it ranks your web site against those of competitors. How often and where you use keywords and the quality of the keywords is critical. The best quality keywords are those that are most commonly used by Internet users searching for your products or services.

For visitors to your website and search engine spiders that will crawl through your site – CONTENT IS IMPORTANT. That’s why content should never be an afterthought – just something to fill in the white space between images and flashy multimedia presentations. Our tips for writing good content will help you create content that attracts visitors and turns them into customers.

(4) There should always be a constant technical supervision of your site to keep it running smoothly. Just like in all other aspects of life’s journey, the cyber-highway also has it’s pot-holes and road hazards. You want to make sure your host server is always doing what it’s supposed to, that your files and file directory structures remain intact, and that all your links are still functional.  You should also review a regular report of site statistics, to see how much traffic you are getting, where it’s coming from, in order to evaluate the overall effectiveness of your web.   Anyone who relies on their site for business purposes should have it monitored daily.

 

How to make your changes and updates to your website

WRITTEN CHANGES:

• Phone calls and meetings are great, but they do take away from your maintenance time.  To ensure that the communication is accurate regarding how you want the changes to be made, all website changes and input must be submitted in writing via email.
• Textual content sent should be edited and ready to go on to the web.  It will be reviewed for glaring grammatical or spelling errors, but nothing beyond that.
• Be specific on where you want your changes to go, and generally how you want them to look.
• Please OH Please reread your email BEFORE you send it to Wowsers Web Design to ensure that it is clear how to make your website changes.  And make sure you have included all the information and attachments to make the website changes.
• Please ensure that your email’s subject line is filled in or our agressive SPAM killer will zap your email.
• Retyping text and reformatting text is time consuming and will take away from other more important tasks for your website.  So please send your changes either as part of the email or in a MSWord Document. 

DIGITAL/GRAPHIC IMAGES:

• Web ready digital images can be emailed, sent via www.dropbox.com or by disc and sent via US Mail.
• Scanning pictures or resizing photos are time consuming, and will take away from other more important tasks for your website.
  Make sure all digital images are properly labeled.  This will help alleviate any confusion.   And clearly indicate where/what page you would like the image(s) to appear.
• For ease of emailing and uploading your digital images should be between 250-800kb.

We Want Your Website To Be Successful!