How important is it to keep your website up to date?

The impact that your website has on the general public is more viable than you may think. One of the reasons why you should keep your website up to date is because your website is an advertising medium for your business that has the potential of capturing the attention of a large number of people. Many people are visual, so you want to make sure that the presentation of your website helps to instill a sense of trustworthiness in those who view it. Following are areas of your website that you should pay close attention to when you are updating it.

Contact Information

One of the things that businesses tend to forget to do is to update their website when they move or change their phone number. Not keeping your contact information updated sends the message that you are lazy, or even worse, careless and sloppy. As the worldwide web has a broad audience, think about the potential business you could be missing out on if your website reflects incorrect information.

Fresh Content

Unless you have a specialized website where the content does not need to be updated regularly, it is important to keep the content fresh, and in an organized manner. Readers tend to get bored reading the same content over and over again. Disorganized content can be quite confusing, and will not reflect well on you, or your company. If you feature articles on your website, replace the articles weekly, or at the very least, every two weeks with new ones. As major search engines crawl websites looking for new content, updating your website content increases your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Visuals

Having professional looking visuals on your site will help to get you talked about, hopefully in a good way. If you have unappealing visuals on your website, people may not feel inclined to return to it. There’s a saying that a picture speaks a thousand words. If you have poor quality pictures or visuals on your website, this sends an unfavorable message to those who visit your site, such as a lack of professionalism, or sloppiness. Again, as your website is an important medium of advertisement, it’s all about the presentation.

User Friendly Site

Design your website to be user friendly, meaning, making it easy for a person to navigate their way around your site to find answers to questions that they might have about a particular product or service. In order to accomplish this, you may have to redesign your site. If it is not easy for people to find the information they are looking for, they will likely get annoyed and go to another more user friendly website that offers the same products or services, and make purchases on that website instead of yours.

Impressionable Homepage

When someone visits your website, the homepage is often the first page they see. If they are not impressed enough with it, they are likely not going to click on any of the other pages on your site. As they say, first impressions are lasting impressions. You only get one chance to make a first impression. Your homepage should be updated regularly, and should immediately grab the attention of those who view it.

Keeping your website up to does take time and effort. If you have the skills and the time, you can do it yourself, otherwise you can hire a reputable and qualified webmaster to handle this task for you. Keep in mind that your website is a reflection of you, your company. Therefore, it is important that regularly updated quality content is what your website reflects.