Why Your Website is Always a Work in Progress

Here’s a scenario we’ve seen many times: A business shells out a good chunk of change in order to create the website of their dreams. Maybe this happened 5 years ago, maybe only a few months ago. But either way, they are astonished when we tell them that their website needs ongoing, constant maintenance. Because as great as that website is, the nature of the medium and how online marketing and search engine optimization work mean that it is not a static object, like a book, that can be published and set aside. It’s a work in progress.

Why is My Website a Work in Progress?

Here are a few reasons why your website should always be a work in progress and some tips for how to approach this:

• Google loves fresh content (have we mentioned that Google is king??), so to keep the Google search engines happy, you should always be looking for ways to add new photos, update copy, add recent stories, etc.
• Your blog should be constantly active. Posting at least once a week is ideal. This keeps your site looking fresh (especially if you have a blog feed on the home page) and gives you new opportunities for links each week.
• Not everything works on the first try. Ben Hunt‘s excellent book Convert! shares tips on how to design websites to increase traffic and conversion rates (i.e., the likelihood that someone will do the action that you want them to do–whether entering their email address for a newsletter signup or buying your book). One of the major takeaways is that it can take constant tweaks to finally get your site to function that way you want – some might be big changes and some might be small, but experimenting is the only way to know what works. Keep trying out new copy, links, and format with an eye on your site analytics.
• Related to the above, you should always be keeping an eye on your keywords in your Google AdWords account to see which are leading to the most conversions. As you change your Google efforts, you need to make sure that your site is reflecting those adjustments (or else you might have some very confused target customers landing on your page).

Instead of being discouraged by this, and possibly feeling a little peeved that you paid all this money for something that is still a work in progress, we think you should see it as an opportunity. Perfecting your site (or getting somewhere close) should be an enjoyable endeavor. You can even see it as a kind of game – when you move this button here, do more people click? When you emphasize a different keyword, do you see more traffic? And of course we are always here to give you a hand with these kinds of changes.

If you have any questions about the regular updates you should be making on your site, please don’t hesitate to contact Niki at [email protected].