A website, unlike a brochure, is never truly complete. The good news is, unlike those old brochures that are attracting dust on the shelf, your website should be easy to update.
We recommend that our clients update their website every few months. Sometimes this is a simple framework update for security, and sometimes it’s an entire design update to better reflect your brand or be more appealing to your target clients.
Ultimately, there are three primary reasons to update your website:
1. Mobile Devices, Phones & Tablets
You may be familiar with responsive web design where the content on your website automatically formats to the device that is requesting it. This is a BIG deal for your online marketing as more and more websites become responsive your clients and prospects will expect that your website is responsive too.
In the u201cold daysu201d (like 2011 and 2012) clients often created mobile versions of their websites so that their audience could see your website on mobile phones with no magnifying class. The problem with these mobile versions of your website is that they looked terrible and required you to maintain two separate versions of your website u2013 what a pain.
Remember the days when you knew you needed a website for your company to be credible? Now you need a responsive website or you risk being perceived as out of touch. If your website doesn’t work and look great on every type of device your target audience will probably move on to your competition u2013 you know the one, the guys with the great website that looks great on wide screen desktop monitors, tablets and mobile phones. Your client’s expectations are changing and if your website is not responsive, you risk being overlooked.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Website search engine optimization is a process, not an event. You can’t spend hours one day optimizing your website for keywords and then relax. Google and the other search engines (yes, there are a few others out there) are constantly changing their algorithms. This means that you need to be ever vigilant in maintaining and improving your websites SEO.
There are some simple things you can do to improve your websites SEO such as
- Optimizing your page titles
- Ensuring your images are properly tagged
- Blogging regularly
We can do this virtually on any website. WordPressu00a0(our recommendations for website content management system frameworks) regularly update their core framework in order to u201cdanceu201d better with Google and make it easier to discover your website content.
If you are on an outdated version of your website framework managing your website for optimized SEO is a laborious task u2013 often it’s nearly impossible.
3. Security
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. People will try to hack your website u2014 it’s not a matter of if, but when. There are several things you can do to increase your website security, although one of the simplest and most effective is to keep your website framework up to date.
Both WordPress and regularly update their framework address additional security risks (these updates are one of the many reasons we believe you should use one of the leading content management systems as your website framework). If you are not updating your website regularly you increase your risk of being hacked.
Updating your website can be as simple as ensuring that we update your framework. Both WordPress and (current versions) provide simple u201cone buttonu201d updates for their core framework. Updating your website for SEO will require more active participation on your end and updating your website to a responsive design may require some outside assistance. Remember, your website is there to help you reach your audience and grow your organization; regularly updating your website is a key part of that strategy.
