Who updates your website?
Wed, Mar 9 2005
One of the things we've always focused on at IVT is making sure our clients can update their sites themselves, providing a Site Administration System in SiteBuilder that can be used to add content like news items, products, and articles. But no matter how easy the tools are to use, the problem always comes back to the human element: who can find the time to do site updates anyway?
Even here at IVT where we have all the expertise in the world at managing websites it's still very easy to let time slip by without making any changes to our own site. We're all busy, things are happening all around us and after a while we suddenly realise that our website hasn't been updated in six months.
Recently I added a little weekly reminder to my Palm Pilot so that an alarm goes off when it's time to do another website news item or update the site content. Each week it wakes up and beeps at me to say I need to do something about updating the site.
For those without a PDA there's also a 'reminder' feature in SiteBuilder that lets you set a reminder interval for different sections of your site. If it notices the content in a section hasn't been updated for more than a specified interval it sends out a warning email telling you to do something about it. Some sections may need to be updated only every few months, some every couple of weeks, and some every day or two. The interval can be set appropriately for different sections.
In the end though these are still just technical tools to solve a human problem, and unless you have someone specifically assigned to look after your site it's likely to be overlooked for months or even years. Tools won't help you if no-one uses them.
If you don't have a "Website Manager" within your business I highly recommend that you do something about it *today*. You don't need a dedicated person for it, just someone who can take responsibility for polishing up the site from time to time. Updating your website by adding news items or short articles doesn't have to be a time consuming process or require technical skill. With SiteBuilder it can be done just through a web browser. But unless you assign someone to be your Website Manager and make sure they know that part of their job is looking after your site, it just won't get done.
Large businesses often have a whole team assigned to managing their site, with Contributors submitting content for approval by Section Editors, who in turn report to a Website Manager. That's great if there is a budget for it, but it doesn't need to be that complicated for a typical small to medium business site. Just having someone look over your site every week or two and keep it up to date will put you miles ahead of most businesses out there who set up a website and then just forget about it.