Website Redesign How to: The Final Chapter

Jul. 28, 2010

Website Redesign - The End Over the last few months we’ve put together a blog series on redesigning your website. The inspiration for this series was our own site redesign which we released in early February. Our site redesign has been great and it served to remind us what it’s like to be in our customers’ shoes during a redesign. As a result, we thought it would make everyone’s lives a little easier if we put together a blog series to walk through the steps of a redesign, covering everything from why you should do one, to building an SEO strategy once your site is up and running.

Today’s post is the final one in the series, and it focuses on keeping the website up to date once you’ve gone through the effort of redesigning and optimizing your new site. The reality is that if you’re site isn’t up to date then it isn’t going to have a positive impact on your lead generation initiatives, and could even end up being detrimental.

Keeping a website up to date can be a large job, but that doesn’t mean it has to be an overwhelming one. By taking into account the following tips, you can ensure that your website is current, relevant and that it is doing all that it can to generate more leads for your business.

So what can you do to ensure that your website stays current?

Allocate the appropriate resources. Often companies make the mistake of thinking that once their site is up and running, it will become an automatic lead generation machine. Realistically, the redesign is only the tip of the iceberg. Once your site is published, you need to make sure you have the needed resources from people to time, to make sure that you have the ability to keep your site up to date.
Content, content, content. We wrote an entire post during this series on content creation strategies, but we thought it was important to emphasize it here. You don’t just get to create website copy and enough content to get your site up. You need to be continually creating, re-purposing and renewing content to ensure that your website is always fresh and relevant.
Make sure you’re measuring for improvement. The only way to successfully monitor your new website and to understand the effectiveness of your web marketing efforts is to incorporate website analytics into your marketing strategy. At the end of the day, the only way that you can continue to improve your website is to understand the areas where you’re falling short and analytics can tell you that. We suggest using Google Analytics because it is free, feature-rich and not too complicated for beginners. If you want to learn more about how you can implement web analytics into your strategy you can check out our blog post on “Getting Started with Web Analytics.”

You can view the rest of the posts in the series via the links below:

Image by julianrod on Flickr

Posted by Amberlie Denny at July 28, 2010 8:00 AM