My Web-Centric New Year's Resolution
I usually have a really hard time coming up with a New Year’s resolution. I don’t know what it is, but the annual goal-setting exercise has never been a big draw for me.
That is until this year.
You see, I’m tired of being out of date. And when I say out of date, I’m referring to the Worcester Business Journal website. Here’s my confession: We had our 2010 Editorial Calendar up well into 2011. I knew I was behind schedule. I even thought of taking down the old calendar back in December, but somehow there just wasn’t enough time.
Falling Behind
If you are part of a small business, chances are you know the feeling. If you’re not directly responsible for the care and feeding of your website, you at least visit it regularly. And you’ve probably noticed marketing brochures that are well beyond their expiration date or ex-employees that are still listed on your Contact Us page.
Well it’s a new year, folks, and I suggest you join me in resolving to not let these out-of-date websites eat at us any longer. It’s time to face our problem and solve it.
Of course, this is much easier said than done. And I know this because so many websites are woefully dusty. For example, I went to a local nonprofit organization’s website and found a listing of their hours prominently displayed on the homepage with the label 2009. That sounds helpful doesn’t it?
So why are all our websites so out of date? I can only speak to my own experience, which is that we have competing priorities, and combing the website for past-due information doesn’t make it to the top of the list. But it should.
That’s because the first impression of a prospective customer is often courtesy of your business’s website. If your press release page hasn’t seen any new postings in the last decade, that sends a signal to the prospective customer that you aren’t on top of your game as an organization. Compared side by side with a competitor who has an up-to-date site, and the competitor is likely to win out.
Pulling It Together
So how do we get a handle on our websites?
My solution was to develop a system. And it’s not that complicated, don’t worry. There are a handful of pages on WBJournal.com that need to be monitored to make sure they’re up to date, so I created a note in my Google Calendar to check each page once per month to make sure they are current. That way, I’ll get a reminder on a set schedule to review the pages in question. I invested about 10 minutes setting up the calendar reminders and I expect to spend about 5 minutes reviewing each page on the appointed day. That’s a pretty small investment in time to make sure people get the information they need when they visit WBJournal.com.
The key strategy that I’ve found useful when it comes to keeping websites top of mind is to make it the responsibility of more than one person. If you rely on your marketing manager to keep on top of everything web related, chances are you’re going to be disappointed. Websites today are too complicated for one person to man alone.
But if you make every staff member a stakeholder in your website, you’ll have more sets of eyes on it making sure you’re site is never an embarrassment. Divvy out assignments, so one department is responsible for one set of pages, while another department keeps tabs on another set. By spreading out the responsibility, you’ll likely get better results, and you’ll have a team that is more web-oriented, which is not a bad idea in the second decade of the 21st century.
I hope you can join me in my New Year’s resolution. And let’s hope we don’t have to repeat it in 2012.
Got news for our Digital Diva column? E-mail Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments