By Alli Summerford
January 15, 2004
I hope this newsletter finds your 2004 off to a good start!
I wanted to write with some ideas for possible New Year’s Resolutions for your web site. It is imperative that we look continually at your site to ensure that it continues to serve your business’ needs.
I recommend the following three resolutions (some may be more relevant to your site than others):
- Design – has it been more than two years since your site was designed? In Internet terms, that can be a long time. Many designs will stand the test of time but might just need a little freshening up to add some new life and to answer the demands and ever-changing standards of the Internet. Other designs, particularly those more than 3-4 years old, may need more than a tune up.
- Content, content, content – if you haven’t updated the content of your site in the last 3 months, it has been too long. Let’s look at what you have, what needs updating, and more importantly what needs adding. What content can you add to your web site that would be of benefit to your customers or clients? For example, if your site doesn’t have an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page, that might be useful to your customers and potential customers.
- Trim down the JavaScript code – The new thinking is that code for navigation rollovers etc written in JavaScript be taken out of the code of each page and put instead into an external file that is simply linked to in each page of the site. Doing so has several advantages, but one of the most compelling is that your site’s keywords and content all move up, up, up in the code, signaling to the search engines their importance and boosting your site’s relevancy ratings. PLAIN ENGLISH: this can have a positive impact on your search engine rankings. In the wake of Google’s recent Florida update that have upset many long-standing high rankings, this change can help to reverse the slide. This is a simple thing to do and relatively inexpensive, depending on the total number of pages in your site.
If you are interested in looking at these ideas further, I am happy to give you a price for these upgrades. If you have content ready to be added to your site – send it on! Let’s keep the site fresh and interesting to new and old visitors alike and make sure that you are projecting the best, and most current, image to those prospective customers and clients that only know you through the face presented by your web site.
– Alli Summerford, January 2004
