How to keep your website up-to-date

Keeping your small business website alive and valuable means that, as a business owner, you will need to continue to regularly feed your investment. Finding the extra time can be tough, but with a little bit of planning and these helpful tips, your website will be well fed!

1. Make a schedule

Monthly updates are a great starting point. Schedule a meeting with yourself (and anyone who will be helping you) for a specific day of each month. Go ahead and mark it in your agenda!  Give  yourself a few hours so that you can do a brief evaluation of your website\’s current status and still have plenty of time to write about recent events, which could include:

• Notes on recent projects
• New product launches
• Holiday specials
• Industry news
• Internal happenings (new staff, new offices)
• Recent conferences, books, news items, etc

If you are really enthusiastic, you can also devote an hour or two per week to updates. Just schedule yourself for a meeting and be sure to show up on time.

2. Automate with Feeds

If your business is already using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or YouTube, you can set your website up to automatically display your social media content by using feeds. That way you can update your content in one place, without wasting time logging in, copying, pasting,  rewriting, etc. Depending on your website configuration, this is usually achieved by using plugins, embed code or doing some simple custom programming.  The reverse is also true. If your website has a RSS feed, then some social media sites can use this feed to display your website updates.

3. Ask for testimonials

Get other people to write about your business! Ask for testimonials from your customers. You can create a testimonials section on your website that clients can fill out and publish. Or  you can ask for comments via Facebook or even BuyAlaska.com (if you’re an Alaskan business owner).

4. Hire a professional

Sometimes, a little help is all it takes to get things done. A web professional can post new photos, add updates to your website, maintain Facebook and Twitter accounts and even generate fresh, new content. Not to mention make regular backups of your site and make sure that the files are up-to-date with the latest security fixes.  I hope you’ve found this article useful. Check out our other article for more info on the life span of a website.