It's time to update your website.
Update, update and update.
Websites shouldn’t collect dust. That’s bad for your SEO and any interest people might have to visit your site. It is also bad for your security. Updating your site can be thought of as three main areas that should deserve your attention: content, style and structure.
Content. The ‘you’ of your website.
The collection of text and images you have describing your company, your products/services and how you do business is clearly important and should still be updated regularly even if you haven’t changed how you do business, per se. For your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) alone you should be adding/updating content, and for your site visitors (assuming you want them to keep visiting) you need to show them something new, give them a reason to come back. Maybe this takes the shape of a small blog or news area, or an ongoing article or case study series about how you solve problems, but whatever you can do, do it consistently so your audience has something to engage with.
Style. Dress for success.
Website design is like fashion, some things are timeless classics and others are all the rage until they get replaced the following month. Decide on your brand’s tone and position before making definitive choices about its style. There are lots of cool things that are not a good fit for everyone, so avoid irrelevant bells and whistles that detract from your core message. Making your site easy to navigate, read and understand and pleasant to visit are far more important than the colour scheme or typefaces employed. However, it is worth the time to research website design trends and to harness anything that can be a good fit and help set your website apart from the competition – just make sure the updates relate to who you are, and complement the information you are providing.
Structure. More than just your web pages.
There is somewhat less flexibility when it comes to updating your site structure, especially if you use a Content management System (CMS) like Joomla! or Wordpress. The relationships between pages and how things load, pop-up or link to each other may be fine but CMS version you use should be updated whenever possible because the security of your site can benefit. Not only do the creators of the CMS stop providing patches/bug fixes/support after a period of time, hackers can more easily gain access as your CMS ages. If you have a lot of customization then a standard upgrade can be tricky, it will then require a web developer with upgrade experience to really sort out what extensions and components can be automatically updated and what needs to be replaced or manually edited to allow for the new CMS version to work.
Updating is an ongoing and important process, and you should speak with your web host to make sure any updates are compatible with your hosting environment first.
- Chris Elsworthy
