You may have a friend who has recently launched a website and feels ready to throw a virtual party on social media or to hold a real life celebration to mark the day her website finally went public. This may seem like a milestone, but there is one important thing your friend should keep in mind: her website will never be finished. You aren’t casting aspersions on the people who did the design or the content on the site, but any decent website is never finished but requires constant updating to make it the design into a triumph and the content the powerhouse it should be.
Like people, websites should always be growing and changing. This means adding to its visual and written content, making it more accessible to users and ensuring it looks great on mobile screens as well as on Macs and PCs. When you aren’t tweaking your website and updating its metrics, you are studying analytics and trying to measure user engagement, new visits and what that all means. You should use this data to figure out what is working on your website and what is falling flat. In short, your website needs a constant workout.
Your Website is You
Whether you use your website for business, to give your cat the public adoration it has indicated that it deserves or to feature your blog, remember that your website does not only represent you to the world, it is you. Aside from your posts on social media, your website is what the online universe knows about you, and the online universe is becoming a bigger part of our reality with each passing day. Your website is not only your resume or business card, it is your online face and body.
Just as you may change the way you apply your makeup or shave or give yourself a daily workout in a gym to stay fit, so you should be revamping and shaping up your website constantly. You may need to hire the services of a website builder to get your site into condition.
What to Focus on
When examining your website, make a checklist of things you need to test. First of all, how does it look at first glance? You may not be the best judge because chances are, you visit it almost every day, but have someone look at it with fresh eyes and tell you how it impresses (or doesn’t) visually. Second, check your content. Is it up-to-date and engaging? Do you have a mixture of written and video content? Is there enough content?
Next, enlist your friend again to give you an honest opinion of how accessible and well-organized your website is. Again, you know where everything is, but make sure it is easy for a new visitor to find everything. Access your site on mobile to make sure that nothing is lost in the translation between the large and small screen. Then look at analytics to see what visitors are responding to and what engages them.
Almost everyone has a website nowadays, and that is the reason yours has to be excellent. It isn’t enough to put up a website and hope people will show up and enjoy the content you posted months ago. To be successful, a website should be constantly new and fresh. This requires constant attention to detail for rewarding results.