Improve and Maintain Your Web Site
Assess your Web site
An average business Web site requires 2 to 20+ hours per
week in maintenance (mostly editorial time, not technical time), plus 1 to
2+ hours per week to answer email.
Look at other sites
Print out things you particularly like and which you could
adapt for your site. Approach this from four perspectives: - Site structure
- Clarity
- Quality of explanation
- Striking graphics
Visit your site and see how you feel about it.
Look at your site from a DIFFERENT computer than you usually
use. The pages and graphics are not cached so it will bring up the pages
slower -- like most first-time visitors experience them.
Show your site to others and get suggestions and ideas.
Sometimes you'll get your own best ideas when you've shown
your site to people who have not seen it before.
Monitor e-mail from visitors
Visitors are your intended audience. Note what they
criticize, their suggestions, their wishes, even how they phrase things.
Often, visitors explain what's on your site more lucidly than the site
authors did. It's relatively easy to "lift" their language and use it on
your site.
Monitor stats
The most important statistic to track is sales. All Internet
marketing is direct marketing, and you can apply direct marketing sales
source tracking methods to your Web site. You can also use these methods to
track sales leads generated. The next best statistic is the number
of people who visit your site. The weakest, but easiest to measure, is the
number of "hits," the quantity of times each file was requested.
Your web host may provide you
with stats.
You can also use a Web analysis program to show the overall traffic on your Web
site, who is visiting your site, which pages are the most popular, which
sites referred them to your site, etc.
The Web analysis programs analyze and report on data recorded in the "log
file" on your Web server. but you need to be sure that your
web host gives you access to
the raw log files for your web site.
Important for your site overall
- Consider using a site management authoring tool. They let you view, manage
and update the site as a whole. This provides significant productivity
improvements.
- If your site is a marketing site, does it give your prospect
ALL the info he or she needs to make a decision to buy?
- Can a visitor to any page on your site reach any other page
in 3 mouse clicks or less?
- Can visitors subscribe to email notifications of new
additions to your site?
Consider adding functionality to your site
- forms
- user forum
- site search
- news feed
- chat room
Important for each page
- Does this page have a title?
A title is not the same as a headline.
- Does the title include key words and key phrases?
- Does this page have a copyright notice?
- Does this page provide an email address for response?
- Put an email link to Webmaster or Contact us on every page.
- Has someone tested each link on this page to make sure it
works?
- Do your links have descriptions?
- If this is a marketing page, does the text on this page
market effectively?
- Does the text on this page match the personality of your
customers?
- How many seconds does it take to load this page using a 56k modem?
- Is the content of this page's text clear?
- Does this page's text include key words and key phrases?
- Proofread this page for errors in grammar, spelling, and
formatting?
- Test this page to make sure all graphics files download and
display properly.
Important for your home page
- Do you have an effective URL?
- Is it easy to remember?
Does it pass the phone test: Is it easy to give over the phone?
- Consider multiple URLs
- In addition to your regular URL, you might want to use a URL
for your key products.
Think of ways your customers will look for you. See if the URLs are
available.
- Does your home page persuade visitors to enter your site?
- Does your home page explain what your site offers?
- Does your home page help visitors quickly reach the
information they need?
- Does your home page tell visitors what is new?
- Is the most important information up near the top of your
home page?
- Does your home page include your contact information?
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