Maintaining a website can be a daunting task. Of course you know what your company does best, but how do you illustrate that in an appealing/concise matter? What’s the best way to organize your site map so that the flow of information makes sense? There are bound to be a lot of questions when it comes to creating or freshening up your website so here are my top five tips.
Be genuine. No one wants to hear ‘marketing speak,’ aka “We have the best product in the state”… Let your success speak for itself by featuring customer testimonials or explaining from start to finish how you got the idea for your product/service and then state the increased measurement (whether that be sales, awareness, Facebook likes etc.) that can attest to your success.
- Stay simple. The navigation should be easy. You should always be able to get back to the home page. Your navigation bar should stay consistent no matter which page of the website you’re on. Plus, your URLs should be semantic (aka they are relevant to the content on the page). For example, our awards page can be found at www.mccicorp.com/about/awards, our team page (and pictures) can be found at www.mccicorp.com/about/our-team. What you don’t want is “www.mccicorp.com/asdfsfs168541asdfsdfsd” for a link; website visitors won’t remember how to navigate back to that page.
- Be visually appealing. If your website is riddled with stock photography, people are going to pick up on it. As often as you can, have pictures of real people, products, events etc. Website visitors are more likely to look when you have pictures and videos, and when they’re looking, you want them to see your true colors.
- Update update update. No one wants to look at an out of date website. Make sure that you have fresh content. This can be achieved by posting your latest events and news, as a starting point. If the last thing in your news section is an article from 2011 users aren’t going to reference your website as a resource because they know you’re not staying current.
- Let users search. Having a great search functionality is important so that website visitors can find what they’re looking for effectively. Make sure your code is up to snuff so that it is capable of searching all of your website’s content, otherwise information can get buried.
There is a lot that goes into maintaining a website but the important thing is to be candid so that people can get to know your organization’s culture/vision/mission.
