Effective Website Maintenance ( Week 8)

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5. Week 8: Tips for Effective Website Maintenance

   • Offer practical advice on maintaining a website to ensure its longevity and performance.

   Okay, Let's assume that you have a website, and you're the owner of that website.  It gets hairier when you're maintaining other people's sites.  What are the basics of upkeep assuming you want to keep it up to date and well-managed to optimize for whatever business it is you do?

   1) Analytics sweep-
    If you or your website designer has not yet started analyzing the data of which people are actually looking at your site and when, you are missing half the picture!  And it's difficult to get in the habit of doing this, like it's difficult to get to the gym.  But if you start thinking about it as if it's as important as any income you get from your clients, then you'll start to see its significance and hopefully you will begin to start looking and regularly, like a financial diet of data.

   2) Strategize-
   It takes money to make money. Have you found time to make ads? Is it time to start? These are the questions you need to ask yourself as a business, starting with, do I have the funding or the time to commit to attaining more clients?  Once you make those ads or social media posts or newsletter outreach, it's even more important to take advantage of any analytics you have. You have an opportunity to understand your audience.
   

   3) Update any new events you or others in your field are doing, add social media links, and provide people with more information about how they can invest in you or support you with your goals.  This might be your blog, or a specific page on the site that you can be constantly updating. I like to have the same information on three different places on the site if it's the one message that I need to convey, for instance if it's the next monthly support group, or a new sale, or something else that needs more eyes on it.

   4) Find social media avenues to represent yourself and update those profiles regularly.  It really doesn't matter if you have only one or many social media channels as long as you're consistent about it. You can create a plan by having time allotted in your weekly calendar to keep working on your latest social media posts.  You can also create a planning calendar.  It's important to share information related to the season, so be flexible in case something pops up that is of the moment.

   5) Newsletters~! Sometimes the best way to share your message is not just social media. You might want to consider keeping all your favorite and prospective clients abreast of your latest needs, goals, and accomplishments with a regular newsletter. These days most of my groups will send out about three newsletters per month in order to announce regular events.  I've tried to make my own personal newsletter for close friends, but to be honest, I'm not sure how well that's going. There's too much to keep track of.

   6) Keep up with the times.  Every day is another opportunity to learn about more in the field that you're in. Make sure you are keeping up, and if you feel qualified to write about that in your newsletter, tell your constituents about it, too.

   7) Multi-lingual? Did you know that you can create a link on your website that will help your visitors translate your website in practically any language?  Check out https://terrencekava.com
   where I implemented this button on the top right of his floating navigation menu.  Alternatively, if you serve clients in one other language or more, it might be worth your time to translate it yourself and ask your website designer to help implement the mirror site(s) for those languages.
   

   8) Security, Backups, and Cookies! Don't forget to keep trying to implement those "Not today, cookies!" button for those of  you who don't want big brother to know what you've been clicking.  And it never hurts to back things up on a monthly basis especially if you have been making a lot of rapid changes to your site. How do you back it up? At the very least, take screen shots so you have something visual to refer to.  If you have to ask, you might want to employ someone to help you back it up.  It always depends on your platform, but there's always a way to save something. I also recommend keeping a text file somewhere of all your data, for those pages that are important to you.

   9)  Did you lose something? Sometimes things crash for random reasons. Don't forget to that there is a wayback machine that will help you in times of dire need.  If you have had your website up for a year, and then suddenly it crashes, and you didn't think to back it up in time, all hope is not lost.  Go to this website (wayback machine) and see if any version was saved.

   10) I'm going to repeat myself on analytics from number one because if you really want to see how well you're doing, then you need to do analytics over and over until you start to see a pattern. It's like reading a book, understanding the conflicts, and finding your favorite characters. It's also like the laundry because it's never done, and we never seem to find the time for it.  It can be like a wormhole if you allow yourself to really indulge in it. Don't let your work go to waste by not knowing how to improve upon it with analytics.  Learn to read your graphs and figures and align them all with all your attempts at increasing your stats.  Save time in the future by understanding what works and doesn't work.  And stop trying to be a perfectionist if you're spending all of your time only making better content alone!  Remember that communication is a two way street, and if you don't take the time to listen to your constituents, you are not fully using your resources. Writing without knowing your audience is like talking to a wall and expecting your echo to understand more than the person next to you.  The other reason I'm hounding this issue is that this is the hardest one for me to get onto as well.  It's difficult to feel like it's time to stop working on the creation and move onto review time. I get it.  We all want to keep creating because that's a safer place.  I am asking you to get up on the stage and deliver while listening for the crickets yet hoping for cheers and laughter.  Some people think of this part as scarier than death.
   

   
   

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