Yesterday we kicked off a new series: Free Online Gifts Every Communicator Can Give. These are little gifts anyone can give to the people they communicate with.
Online Gift #1: An Up-to-Date Website
We’ve all been to websites that were not kept up to date – the information we were looking for wasn’t there or the homepage featured an announcement about an event that took place last month. So, how about I keep this post really short and you click around and review the content on your website. Here are some suggestions.
- Remove any promotional graphics/announcements for events that have already taken place.
- Make sure the calendar has all of this months events on it.
- If you have a page that lists staff and/or volunteers, make sure its up to date. If there are pics of the staff that are 3+ years old, replace them.
- Look through the navigation menu for entire pages that are obsolete and can be unpublished or deleted.
- If you have a big Christmas event coming up, make sure there’s a page for it on your website and there’s a big graphic linking to it on your homepage. Make it easy for people to find and share it.
Any other suggestions?
When you’re done with your site review, come back and share with us what you added, removed or changed?
4 Comments
Thanks for the reminder, Paul. I went through and took out a page, added our Christmas service times to the sidebar and tweaked a couple of other things on our church website http://www.trinitytariffville.org. Much better! Blessed Advent!
Yea Carolyn! Way to go! Thanks for sharing that with us here.
I would add two more: 1. check out your status in Google Webmaster Tools or other monitoring tools to ensure there are no major indexing problems, and similarly, 2. use a tool to check for broken links & 404 errors. It's a great season to think about renewal. A very timely post; keep it up Paul!
Good suggestions Stephen!