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Take Back Control Of Your Site
As you search for ways to prevent your site turning into a money pit, your first step should be to look at your web strategy. Defining a web strategy is not about setting stringent rules but setting goals. Failing to have a clear direction and policy regarding the web is a recipe for failure. If you don't know why you are on the web then you cannot measure success, and it will never be anything other than a cost centre.
Your next step should be to ensure someone takes ownership of managing the site. Not just the build, but its ongoing performance. Too often the level of interest in the web site ends upon deployment. Set and forget is not a strategy. The evolving nature of the web will mean that you will need to tinker with your site to get the best results. This means that ultimately success will boil down to questions of control. The ability to make timely changes, and the increasing necessity for you to be able to make those changes yourself.
No matter how stable your business might be, eventually you are going to need to make a change. Thought should be given to how that occurs and how much it is going to cost the business, not just initially but over the life of the web site. Control should be the prime consideration. Even if your web site is to be nothing more than a glorified Yellow Pages advertisement, you will need to make updates from time to time. Addresses change, product lines alter, and legal requirements necessitate updates. Your web site should be the most up to date frontage for your business. The saddest thing on the web is something that screams a lack of maintenance.
Content dates very quickly on the web and the time lapse between witty and "try hard" is short. A do nothing strategy will impact on the credibility of your company on-line and leave embarrassing legacies on your pages. The three prime areas regarding content where you are most likely to trip up if you don't update regularly are terminology, dates and news items.
Try to avoid using fashionable terms that anchor your site in time. Words like Millennium and anything with a dot com in the title do nothing but highlight a tardy update process. Be careful about listing dates and if you are not going to update it regularly don't have a news area. A press release from 10 months ago is not news, put it in the archive. Better to have nothing than to insult the intelligence of your visitors.
The traditional construction model has usually involved a fixed price initial build with an ongoing maintenance arrangement with a web developer. The site builders know that often the real money is in the updates. It is not uncommon for a company to spend more on content updates than they spent on launching the site in the first place. For a company dabbling in the web this is often a Catch-22 situation. Do nothing and watch the site wither on the vine, or pay a developer hourly rates for content updates and blow the budget. There is another way.
Make sure your goals are realistic and then look at ways of internalising the day to day management of the key areas that contribute to achieving them. If one of your aims is to streamline information delivery then make sure that you have the means to add and edit the key deliverables. You don't want to have to go running to your developer every time you want to upload a new product catalogue. Look beyond the initial site launch. Content management will be an ongoing issue and browser based maintenance systems are getting cheaper all the time.
About the Author
Tim Giles is a Pre Marketing Consultant for Enedia (www.enedia.com). Enedia's client's include Ansearch (www.ansearch.com.au), an Australian search engine and directory.
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